Instructify: Demystifying Metadata to Visual Instruction Tuning Data Conversion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hansen, Jacob, Lin, Wei, Kang, Junmo, Mirza, Muhammad Jehanzeb, Luo, Hongyin, Feris, Rogerio, Ritter, Alan, Glass, James, Karlinsky, Leonid
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hansen, Jacob
Lin, Wei
Kang, Junmo
Mirza, Muhammad Jehanzeb
Luo, Hongyin
Feris, Rogerio
Ritter, Alan
Glass, James
Karlinsky, Leonid
author_facet Hansen, Jacob
Lin, Wei
Kang, Junmo
Mirza, Muhammad Jehanzeb
Luo, Hongyin
Feris, Rogerio
Ritter, Alan
Glass, James
Karlinsky, Leonid
contents Visual Instruction Tuning (VisIT) data, commonly available as human-assistant conversations with images interleaved in the human turns, are currently the most widespread vehicle for aligning strong LLMs to understand visual inputs, converting them to strong LMMs. While many VisIT datasets are available, most are constructed using ad-hoc techniques developed independently by different groups. They are often poorly documented, lack reproducible code, and rely on paid, closed-source model APIs such as GPT-4, Gemini, or Claude to convert image metadata (labels) into VisIT instructions. This leads to high costs and makes it challenging to scale, enhance quality, or generate VisIT data for new datasets. In this work, we address these challenges and propose an open and unified recipe and approach,~\textbf{\method}, for converting available metadata to VisIT instructions using open LLMs. Our multi-stage \method features an efficient framework for metadata grouping, quality control, data and prompt organization, and conversation sampling. We show that our approach can reproduce or enhance the data quality of available VisIT datasets when applied to the same image data and metadata sources, improving GPT-4 generated VisIT instructions by ~3\% on average and up to 12\% on individual benchmarks using open models, such as Gemma 2 27B and LLaMa 3.1 70B. Additionally, our approach enables effective performance scaling - both in quantity and quality - by enhancing the resulting LMM performance across a wide range of benchmarks. We also analyze the impact of various factors, including conversation format, base model selection, and resampling strategies. Our code, which supports the reproduction of equal or higher-quality VisIT datasets and facilities future metadata-to-VisIT data conversion for niche domains, is released at https://github.com/jacob-hansen/Instructify.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18115
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Instructify: Demystifying Metadata to Visual Instruction Tuning Data Conversion
Hansen, Jacob
Lin, Wei
Kang, Junmo
Mirza, Muhammad Jehanzeb
Luo, Hongyin
Feris, Rogerio
Ritter, Alan
Glass, James
Karlinsky, Leonid
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Visual Instruction Tuning (VisIT) data, commonly available as human-assistant conversations with images interleaved in the human turns, are currently the most widespread vehicle for aligning strong LLMs to understand visual inputs, converting them to strong LMMs. While many VisIT datasets are available, most are constructed using ad-hoc techniques developed independently by different groups. They are often poorly documented, lack reproducible code, and rely on paid, closed-source model APIs such as GPT-4, Gemini, or Claude to convert image metadata (labels) into VisIT instructions. This leads to high costs and makes it challenging to scale, enhance quality, or generate VisIT data for new datasets. In this work, we address these challenges and propose an open and unified recipe and approach,~\textbf{\method}, for converting available metadata to VisIT instructions using open LLMs. Our multi-stage \method features an efficient framework for metadata grouping, quality control, data and prompt organization, and conversation sampling. We show that our approach can reproduce or enhance the data quality of available VisIT datasets when applied to the same image data and metadata sources, improving GPT-4 generated VisIT instructions by ~3\% on average and up to 12\% on individual benchmarks using open models, such as Gemma 2 27B and LLaMa 3.1 70B. Additionally, our approach enables effective performance scaling - both in quantity and quality - by enhancing the resulting LMM performance across a wide range of benchmarks. We also analyze the impact of various factors, including conversation format, base model selection, and resampling strategies. Our code, which supports the reproduction of equal or higher-quality VisIT datasets and facilities future metadata-to-VisIT data conversion for niche domains, is released at https://github.com/jacob-hansen/Instructify.
title Instructify: Demystifying Metadata to Visual Instruction Tuning Data Conversion
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18115