Daiki Shiono

Daiki Shiono, Shumpei Miyawaki, Ryota Tanaka et al.

Following the initial flourishing of large language models (LLMs), there has been a surge in proposed large vision-language models (LVLMs) that integrate LLMs with vision capabilities. However, it has been observed that LVLMs, after tuning to visual instruction using commonly used training datasets, often fail to exhibit the instruction-following ability that was present in the LLM before integration, leading to results in which they do not follow task instructions as expected. This study quantitatively demonstrates that LVLMs' instruction-following ability declines after fine-tuning and analyzes its underlying causes. In particular, we constructed new training datasets highlighting whether the output format is specified. Then, we investigated how explicitly indicating the output format during fine-tuning affects LVLMs' instruction-following ability. Our quantitative evaluation confirmed that LVLMs' instruction-following ability declines after fine-tuning with commonly used datasets. Furthermore, we found that LVLMs trained with datasets, including instructions on output format, tend to follow instructions more accurately than models that do not. These findings suggest that including samples with instructions on output format during (visual) instruction tuning may help mitigate the decline in instruction-following abilities.

Shojiro Yamabe, Futa Waseda, Daiki Shiono et al.

Recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been applied to diverse VQA tasks. However, achieving practical performance typically requires task-specific fine-tuning with large numbers of image-text pairs, which are costly to collect. In this work, we study text-centric training, a setting where only textual descriptions are available and no real images are provided, as a paradigm for low-cost data scaling. Unlike images, whose collection is often restricted by privacy constraints and scarcity in niche domains, text is widely available. Moreover, text is easily editable, enabling automatic diversification and expansion with LLMs at minimal human effort. While this offers clear advantages over image collection in terms of scalability and cost, training on raw text without images still yields limited gains on VQA tasks because of the image-text modality gap. To address this issue, we propose a Text-Printed Image (TPI), which generates synthetic images by directly rendering the given textual description on a plain white canvas. This simple rendering projects text into the image modality and can be integrated into arbitrary existing LVLM training pipelines at low cost. Moreover, TPI preserves the semantics of the text, whereas text-to-image models often fail to do. Across four models and seven benchmarks, our systematic experiments show that TPI enables more effective text-centric training than synthetic images generated by a diffusion model. We further explore TPI as a low-cost data-augmentation strategy and demonstrate its practical utility. Overall, our findings highlight the significant potential of text-centric training and, more broadly, chart a path toward fully automated data generation for LVLMs.

Keishi Ishihara, Kento Sasaki, Tsubasa Takahashi et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been applied to autonomous driving to support decision-making in complex real-world scenarios. However, their training on static, web-sourced image-text pairs fundamentally limits the precise spatiotemporal reasoning required to understand and predict dynamic traffic scenes. We address this critical gap with STRIDE-QA, a large-scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset for physically grounded reasoning from an ego-centric perspective. Constructed from 100 hours of multi-sensor driving data in Tokyo, capturing diverse and challenging conditions, STRIDE-QA is the largest VQA dataset for spatiotemporal reasoning in urban driving, offering 16 million QA pairs over 285K frames. Grounded by dense, automatically generated annotations including 3D bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and multi-object tracks, the dataset uniquely supports both object-centric and ego-centric reasoning through three novel QA tasks that require spatial localization and temporal prediction. Our benchmarks demonstrate that existing VLMs struggle significantly, achieving near-zero scores on prediction consistency. In contrast, VLMs fine-tuned on STRIDE-QA exhibit dramatic performance gains, achieving 55% success in spatial localization and 28% consistency in future motion prediction, compared to near-zero scores from general-purpose VLMs. Therefore, STRIDE-QA establishes a comprehensive foundation for developing more reliable VLMs for safety-critical autonomous systems.

Ryohei Kamei, Daiki Shiono, Reina Akama et al.

With the remarkable development of large language models (LLMs), ensuring the factuality of output has become a challenge. However, having all the contents of the response with given knowledge or facts is not necessarily a good thing in dialogues. This study aimed to achieve both attractiveness and factuality in a dialogue response for which a task was set to predict sentences that do not require factual correctness judgment such as agreeing, or personal opinions/feelings. We created a dataset, dialogue dataset annotated with fact-check-needed label (DDFC), for this task via crowdsourcing, and classification tasks were performed on several models using this dataset. The model with the highest classification accuracy could yield about 88% accurate classification results.