Silkie: Preference Distillation for Large Visual Language Models
Authors: name: Lei Li, name: Zhihui Xie, name: Mukai Li, name: Shunian Chen, name: Peiyi Wang, name: Liang Chen, name: Yazheng Yang, name: Benyou Wang, name: Lingpeng Kong

This paper explores preference distillation for large vision language models
(LVLMs), improving their ability to generate helpful and faithful responses
anchoring the visual context. We first build a vision-language feedback
(VLFeedback) dataset utilizing AI annotation. Specifically, responses are
generated by models sampled from 12 LVLMs, conditioned on multi-modal
instructions sourced from various datasets. We adopt GPT-4V to assess the
generated outputs regarding helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and ethical
considerations. Furthermore, the preference supervision is distilled into
Qwen-VL-Chat through the direct preference optimization (DPO) method. The
resulting model Silkie, achieves 6.9% and 9.5% relative improvement on the MME
benchmark regarding the perception and cognition capabilities, respectively.
Silkie also demonstrates reduced hallucination by setting a new
state-of-the-art score of 3.02 on the MMHal-Bench benchmark. Further analysis
shows that DPO with our VLFeedback dataset mainly boosts the fine-grained
perception and complex cognition abilities of LVLMs, leading to more
comprehensive improvements compared to human-annotated preference datasets.