Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper: Advancing Multimodal Comprehension with Enhanced Visual Knowledge Alignment
<|reference_start|>Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper: Advancing Multimodal Comprehension with Enhanced Visual Knowledge Alignment: Evaluating and Rethinking the current landscape of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), we observe that widely-used visual-language projection approaches (e.g., Q-former or MLP) focus on the alignment of image-text descriptions yet ignore the visual knowledge-dimension alignment, i.e., connecting visuals to their relevant knowledge. Visual knowledge plays a significant role in analyzing, inferring, and interpreting information from visuals, helping improve the accuracy of answers to knowledge-based visual questions. In this paper, we mainly explore improving LMMs with visual-language knowledge alignment, especially aimed at challenging knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA). To this end, we present a Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper (CVLM), which contains a pretrained Visual Knowledge Aligner (VKA) and a Fine-grained Knowledge Adapter (FKA) used in the multimodal instruction tuning stage. Specifically, we design the VKA based on the interaction between a small language model and a visual encoder, training it on collected image-knowledge pairs to achieve visual knowledge acquisition and projection. FKA is employed to distill the fine-grained visual knowledge of an image and inject it into Large Language Models (LLMs). We conduct extensive experiments on knowledge-based VQA benchmarks and experimental results show that CVLM significantly improves the performance of LMMs on knowledge-based VQA (average gain by 5.0%). Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of VKA and FKA, respectively. The codes are available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper<|reference_end|>
@article{li2024cognitive,
    title={Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper: Advancing Multimodal Comprehension
  with Enhanced Visual Knowledge Alignment},
    author={Yunxin Li, Xinyu Chen, Baotian Hu, Haoyuan Shi, Min Zhang},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.13561},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.13561},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.CV}
}