ImageRef-VL: Enabling Contextual Image Referencing in Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Yi, Jingwei, Yin, Junhao, Xu, Ju, Bao, Peng, Wang, Yongliang, Fan, Wei, Wang, Hao
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866909463157407744
author Yi, Jingwei
Yin, Junhao
Xu, Ju
Bao, Peng
Wang, Yongliang
Fan, Wei
Wang, Hao
author_facet Yi, Jingwei
Yin, Junhao
Xu, Ju
Bao, Peng
Wang, Yongliang
Fan, Wei
Wang, Hao
contents Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding multimodal inputs and have been widely integrated into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based conversational systems. While current VLM-powered chatbots can provide textual source references in their responses, they exhibit significant limitations in referencing contextually relevant images during conversations. In this paper, we introduce Contextual Image Reference -- the ability to appropriately reference relevant images from retrieval documents based on conversation context -- and systematically investigate VLMs' capability in this aspect. We conduct the first evaluation for contextual image referencing, comprising a dedicated testing dataset and evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we propose ImageRef-VL, a method that significantly enhances open-source VLMs' image referencing capabilities through instruction fine-tuning on a large-scale, manually curated multimodal conversation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that ImageRef-VL not only outperforms proprietary models but also achieves an 88% performance improvement over state-of-the-art open-source VLMs in contextual image referencing tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ImageRef-VL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_12418
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ImageRef-VL: Enabling Contextual Image Referencing in Vision-Language Models
Yi, Jingwei
Yin, Junhao
Xu, Ju
Bao, Peng
Wang, Yongliang
Fan, Wei
Wang, Hao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding multimodal inputs and have been widely integrated into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based conversational systems. While current VLM-powered chatbots can provide textual source references in their responses, they exhibit significant limitations in referencing contextually relevant images during conversations. In this paper, we introduce Contextual Image Reference -- the ability to appropriately reference relevant images from retrieval documents based on conversation context -- and systematically investigate VLMs' capability in this aspect. We conduct the first evaluation for contextual image referencing, comprising a dedicated testing dataset and evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we propose ImageRef-VL, a method that significantly enhances open-source VLMs' image referencing capabilities through instruction fine-tuning on a large-scale, manually curated multimodal conversation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that ImageRef-VL not only outperforms proprietary models but also achieves an 88% performance improvement over state-of-the-art open-source VLMs in contextual image referencing tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ImageRef-VL.
title ImageRef-VL: Enabling Contextual Image Referencing in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12418