MyVLM: Personalizing VLMs for User-Specific Queries
Authors: name: Yuval Alaluf, name: Elad Richardson, name: Sergey Tulyakov, name: Kfir Aberman, name: Daniel Cohen-Or

Recent large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable
capabilities in understanding and generating textual descriptions for visual
content. However, these models lack an understanding of user-specific concepts.
In this work, we take a first step toward the personalization of VLMs, enabling
them to learn and reason over user-provided concepts. For example, we explore
whether these models can learn to recognize you in an image and communicate
what you are doing, tailoring the model to reflect your personal experiences
and relationships. To effectively recognize a variety of user-specific
concepts, we augment the VLM with external concept heads that function as
toggles for the model, enabling the VLM to identify the presence of specific
target concepts in a given image. Having recognized the concept, we learn a new
concept embedding in the intermediate feature space of the VLM. This embedding
is tasked with guiding the language model to naturally integrate the target
concept in its generated response. We apply our technique to BLIP-2 and LLaVA
for personalized image captioning and further show its applicability for
personalized visual question-answering. Our experiments demonstrate our ability
to generalize to unseen images of learned concepts while preserving the model
behavior on unrelated inputs.