MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct
Authors: name: Run Luo, name: Haonan Zhang, name: Longze Chen, name: Ting-En Lin, name: Xiong Liu, name: Yuchuan Wu, name: Min Yang, name: Minzheng Wang, name: Pengpeng Zeng, name: Lianli Gao, name: Heng Tao Shen, name: Yunshui Li, name: Xiaobo Xia, name: Fei Huang, name: Jingkuan Song, name: Yongbin Li

The development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has seen
significant advancements. However, the quantity and quality of multimodal
instruction data have emerged as significant bottlenecks in their progress.
Manually creating multimodal instruction data is both time-consuming and
inefficient, posing challenges in producing instructions of high complexity.
Moreover, distilling instruction data from black-box commercial models (e.g.,
GPT-4o, GPT-4V) often results in simplistic instruction data, which constrains
performance to that of these models. The challenge of curating diverse and
complex instruction data remains substantial. We propose MMEvol, a novel
multimodal instruction data evolution framework that combines fine-grained
perception evolution, cognitive reasoning evolution, and interaction evolution.
This iterative approach breaks through data quality bottlenecks to generate a
complex and diverse image-text instruction dataset, thereby empowering MLLMs
with enhanced capabilities. Beginning with an initial set of instructions,
SEED-163K, we utilize MMEvol to systematically broadens the diversity of
instruction types, integrates reasoning steps to enhance cognitive
capabilities, and extracts detailed information from images to improve visual
understanding and robustness. To comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of
our data, we train LLaVA-NeXT using the evolved data and conduct experiments
across 13 vision-language tasks. Compared to the baseline trained with seed
data, our approach achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.1 points and
reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 9 of these tasks.