Are They the Same? Exploring Visual Correspondence Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs
This addresses a critical gap in evaluating and improving visual matching abilities in MLLMs, which is essential for computer vision applications, though it is incremental in benchmarking and model design.
The paper tackles the problem of visual correspondence in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), revealing systematic shortcomings even in strong models like GPT-4o. It introduces the MMVM benchmark and CoLVA model, which achieves 49.80% overall accuracy, surpassing GPT-4o by 7.15% and the best open-source MLLM by 11.72%.
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLM) have shown a strong ability in visual perception, reasoning abilities, and vision-language understanding. However, the visual matching ability of MLLMs is rarely studied, despite finding the visual correspondence of objects is essential in computer vision. Our research reveals that the matching capabilities in recent MLLMs still exhibit systematic shortcomings, even with current strong MLLMs models, GPT-4o. In particular, we construct a Multimodal Visual Matching (MMVM) benchmark to fairly benchmark over 30 different MLLMs. The MMVM benchmark is built from 15 open-source datasets and Internet videos with manual annotation. We categorize the data samples of MMVM benchmark into eight aspects based on the required cues and capabilities to more comprehensively evaluate and analyze current MLLMs. In addition, we have designed an automatic annotation pipeline to generate the MMVM SFT dataset, including 220K visual matching data with reasoning annotation. To our knowledge, this is the first visual corresponding dataset and benchmark for the MLLM community. Finally, we present CoLVA, a novel contrastive MLLM with two novel technical designs: fine-grained vision expert with object-level contrastive learning and instruction augmentation strategy. The former learns instance discriminative tokens, while the latter further improves instruction following ability. CoLVA-InternVL2-4B achieves an overall accuracy (OA) of 49.80\% on the MMVM benchmark, surpassing GPT-4o and the best open-source MLLM, Qwen2VL-72B, by 7.15\% and 11.72\% OA, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our MMVM SFT dataset and our novel technical designs. Code, benchmark, dataset, and models will be released.