Stitch and Tell: A Structured Multimodal Data Augmentation Method for Spatial Understanding
This addresses spatial understanding issues in vision-language models for applications like image captioning and QA, representing an incremental advance with a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles spatial hallucinations in vision-language models by proposing Stitch and Tell (SiTe), a structured multimodal data augmentation method that injects spatial supervision without annotations, resulting in improvements such as +5.50% on MME_Position and +4.19% on Spatial-MM benchmarks.
Existing vision-language models often suffer from spatial hallucinations, i.e., generating incorrect descriptions about the relative positions of objects in an image. We argue that this problem mainly stems from the asymmetric properties between images and text. To enrich the spatial understanding ability of vision-language models, we propose a simple, annotation-free, plug-and-play method named $\text{Stitch and Tell}$ (abbreviated as SiTe), which injects structured spatial supervision into data. It constructs stitched image-text pairs by stitching images along a spatial axis and generating spatially-aware captions or question answer pairs based on the layout of stitched image, without relying on costly advanced models or human involvement. We evaluate SiTe across three architectures including LLaVA-v1.5-7B, LLaVA-Qwen2-1.5B and HALVA-7B, two training datasets, and eight benchmarks. Experiments show that SiTe improves spatial understanding tasks such as $\text{MME}_{\text{Position}}$ (+5.50%) and Spatial-MM (+4.19%), while maintaining or improving performance on general vision-language benchmarks including COCO-QA (+1.02%) and MMBench (+4.76%). Our findings suggest that explicitly injecting spatially-aware structure into training data offers an effective way to mitigate spatial hallucinations and improve spatial understanding, while preserving general vision-language capabilities.