Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning
Authors: name: Zhiyang Xu, name: Chao Feng, name: Rulin Shao, name: Trevor Ashby, name: Ying Shen, name: Di Jin, name: Yu Cheng, name: Qifan Wang, name: Lifu Huang

Despite vision-language models' (VLMs) remarkable capabilities as versatile
visual assistants, two substantial challenges persist within the existing VLM
frameworks: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction
tuning, and (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction
tuning data. Both challenges lead to issues such as poor generalizability,
hallucination, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we
construct Vision-Flan, the most diverse publicly available visual instruction
tuning dataset to date, comprising 187 diverse tasks and 1,664,261 instances
sourced from academic datasets, and each task is accompanied by an
expert-written instruction. In addition, we propose a two-stage instruction
tuning framework, in which VLMs are firstly finetuned on Vision-Flan and
further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. We find this two-stage tuning
framework significantly outperforms the traditional single-stage visual
instruction tuning framework and achieves the state-of-the-art performance
across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. Finally, we conduct
in-depth analyses to understand visual instruction tuning and our findings
reveal that: (1) GPT-4 synthesized data does not substantially enhance VLMs'
capabilities but rather modulates the model's responses to human-preferred
formats; (2) A minimal quantity (e.g., 1,000) of GPT-4 synthesized data can
effectively align VLM responses with human-preference; (3) Visual instruction
tuning mainly helps large-language models (LLMs) to understand visual features.