Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF
Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14525
Summary
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often "hallucinate," producing text that the image does not support. The authors attribute this to weak vision-language alignment, since multimodal instruction data is much smaller than text-only collections. They introduce LLaVA-RLHF, which they describe as the first LMM aligned with reinforcement learning from human feedback. Crowdworkers compared pairs of model answers and favored the one with fewer hallucinations, then the more helpful one. These judgments trained a reward model that guided PPO-style policy optimization.
To reduce reward hacking without repeatedly collecting new feedback, they propose Factually Augmented RLHF (Fact-RLHF). In this method, the reward model also sees factual context such as image captions or correct multiple-choice answers. The supervised stage was improved by adding existing human-annotated datasets reformatted as conversations. For evaluation, they built MMHal-Bench, a benchmark that penalizes hallucination. The approach improved both helpfulness and factual grounding, and the code, model and data are publicly released.
Key points
- About 10K human preference comparisons on image-based conversations cost roughly $3000, a low annotation budget.
- The SFT data mixture behind LLaVA-SFT+ adds:
- VQA-v2 and A-OKVQA, converted into multi-round QA;
- Flickr30k, converted into a Spotting Captioning task.
- The reward model was also strengthened with a higher-resolution vision encoder and a larger language model.
- MMHal-Bench covers 12 main COCO object categories and 8 task types, and its scores correlate well with human judgments.
- Main results:
- LLaVA-Bench: 94% of text-only GPT-4's level, versus 87% for the previous best methods;
- MMHal-Bench: about 60% improvement over baselines;
- MMBench: 52.4%;
- POPE: 82.7% F1.
Cited by
- Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling
- What matters when building vision-language models?
- VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models
- Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity
- mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration
- A Survey of Large Language Models
- InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models
Cite
@misc{sun2023aligning,
title = {{Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF}},
author = {Sun, Zhiqing and Shen, Sheng and Cao, Shengcao and Liu, Haotian and Li, Chunyuan and Shen, Yikang and Gan, Chuang and Gui, Liang-Yan and Wang, Yu-Xiong and Yang, Yiming and Keutzer, Kurt and Darrell, Trevor},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2309.14525},
eprint = {2309.14525},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2309.14525}
}References
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