• Author(s): Chenyu Zhou, Mengdan Zhang, Peixian Chen, Chaoyou Fu, Yunhang Shen, Xiawu Zheng, Xing Sun, Rongrong Ji

“VEGA: Learning Interleaved Image-Text Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Models” introduces a novel approach to enhancing the performance of vision-language large models (VLLMs) by learning interleaved image-text comprehension. This research addresses the challenge of effectively integrating visual and textual information in VLLMs, which is crucial for tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning.

The proposed method, named VEGA (vision-language interleaving training), focuses on training VLLMs to comprehend the interleaved image-text input in a more natural and coherent manner. Unlike traditional approaches that process visual and textual information separately, VEGA interleaves the image and text tokens in a single input sequence. This allows the model to learn the intricate relationships between the two modalities and capture their mutual context.

To facilitate the learning of interleaved image-text comprehension, VEGA employs a novel training strategy that combines masked language modeling and masked image modeling. The model is trained to predict masked tokens in both the text and image domains, encouraging it to learn the dependencies between the two modalities. This joint training approach enables VEGA to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the image-text input and generate more accurate and contextually relevant outputs.The paper provides extensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of VEGA. The authors evaluate their approach on a range of vision-language tasks, including visual question answering, image captioning, and visual reasoning. The results show that VEGA consistently outperforms existing VLLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.

The model’s ability to comprehend interleaved image-text input leads to more accurate and coherent responses, showcasing its superior understanding of the visual and textual context. Furthermore, the paper includes qualitative examples that highlight the benefits of VEGA’s interleaved image-text comprehension. The generated captions and answers produced by VEGA exhibit a higher level of relevance and coherence compared to those of other VLLMs. These examples demonstrate the model’s ability to effectively integrate visual and textual information and generate more natural and contextually appropriate outputs.

“VEGA: Learning Interleaved Image-Text Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Models” presents a significant advancement in the field of vision-language modeling. By learning to comprehend interleaved image-text input, VEGA achieves superior performance on a wide range of vision-language tasks. This research has important implications for developing more advanced and human-like AI systems that can effectively understand and reason about multimodal information.