Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning
本笔记基于摘要 + 公开资料,未读全文。
一句话讲什么(TL;DR)
给会聊天的 AI 配一副"看图眼镜"。把眼镜从一片镜片换成两片,再多给它看点带字的图片,看图答题就刷榜了。
这是个什么场景 — 日常类比
你拍了一张菜单照片发给 ChatGPT,问它"这家有没有素食"。AI 要做对这件事,得同时干两件事:看懂图(认出菜名、看清招牌字)、会聊天(理解你的问题、组织答案)。
问题是:会聊天的语言模型(GPT、LLaMA 这些)天生只认文字,不认图。所以工程师给它配了一副"翻译眼镜"——眼镜负责把图片翻译成模型能读懂的"密码",模型再照常聊天回答。
初代 LLaVA(2023 年 4 月)就是这套思路,但眼镜很简陋:一片薄薄的单层镜片(线性投影),看大致轮廓还行,看菜单上的小字、考试题里的图表就糊了。LLaVA-1.5 做的事很朴素——把镜片换成两片叠起来(两层 MLP),再让模型多看一些带文字、带表格、带考题的图片当教材。模型本身一行代码没改,就在十几个看图答题榜单上拿了开源第一。
这是 2023 年下半年开源 VLM(视觉语言模型)圈的典型故事:少折腾架构、多喂对的数据,反而最划算。

之前的人怎么做的 — 3-5 bullet
- 初代 LLaVA(2023 年 4 月):CLIP(对比语言-图像预训练)的视觉编码器 + 单层线性投影 + Vicuna 语言模型,用 GPT-4 自动生成的多模态指令数据训练;能聊天但 VQA 榜单分数不高
- MiniGPT-4 / mPLUG-Owl:思路类似,用 Q-Former 或单层投影把视觉 token 接到 LLM 上,注重对话流畅
- BLIP-2:用 Q-Former 这种"压缩 + 查询"的桥接方式,参数效率高但训练复杂
- InstructBLIP:在 BLIP-2 基础上加 instruction tuning,VQA 强但开源生态不如 LLaVA
- 共同短板:要么对话强但答 VQA 不准,要么 VQA 准但配方复杂、不好复现;学术 VQA / OCR 任务普遍弱
这篇论文的关键想法
一句话:做菜不在锅多花哨,而在选对食材。同一口家用锅,把食材换全了就能做出大餐。
具体两个赌注:
- 桥接层不需要花哨(连接图像和文字的"翻译镜片"):像把一片镜片换成两片叠加——把单层线性投影换成两层 MLP(多层感知机,中间夹一个非线性激活),表达能力够用,多出来的参数可以忽略
- 数据才是真正的瓶颈:好比模型之前没复习过"看图识字"和"看图答常识题"两类作业。把 OCR(光学字符识别)类(OCR-VQA、TextCaps)和学术 VQA(视觉问答)类(A-OKVQA、OKVQA)数据加进指令微调阶段,对应榜单立刻补齐短板
底层信仰:左边的"看图模块"(CLIP-ViT)和右边的"会说话模块"(Vicuna 大语言模型)都已经够强了,中间那座桥不必复杂;真正决定 VLM 上限的是它做过哪些类型的题。

它怎么做的(方法)— 3-4 段
架构:CLIP-ViT-L/336px(输入分辨率 336×336 的 ViT-Large)→ 两层 MLP 投影 → Vicuna-13B(基于 LLaMA 微调的对话模型)。视觉编码器输出的 patch token 经过 MLP 投影后,被当作"软 token"拼接到文本 token 序列前面,整段一起喂给 LLM 自回归预测下一个 token。
两阶段训练:
- 阶段 1(特征对齐):冻住视觉编码器和 LLM,只训 MLP 投影层,用图像-文本配对数据让投影学会把视觉特征映射到 LLM 的词嵌入空间
- 阶段 2(visual instruction tuning,视觉指令微调):解冻 LLM 一起训练,喂多任务混合的指令数据;这一步是分数提升的关键
数据配方:在初代 LLaVA 的 LLaVA-Instruct-150K(GPT-4 自动构造的多模态对话指令)基础上,混入:
- VQAv2 / GQA(通用 VQA)
- OCR-VQA / TextCaps(文字识别相关)
- A-OKVQA / OKVQA(需常识推理的 VQA)
- 学术 VQA 数据集若干
具体配比和 epoch 数需读原文。
轻量化:分辨率提到 336×336(比初代的 224×224 更清晰);输入 prompt 加上"用一个词或短语回答"这类 response format prompt,让模型在 VQA 短答场景不啰嗦。整套配方训练成本约 1 天 8×A100,比 InstructBLIP 等复杂配方便宜很多。
实验在做什么
主要在 12 个左右的多模态 benchmark 上对比:
- 学术 VQA:VQAv2 / GQA / VizWiz / ScienceQA-IMG / TextVQA — 测"看图答事实问题"
- 多模态对话 / 综合:MME / MMBench / SEED-Bench / LLaVA-Bench-Wild — 测综合理解和指令跟随
- OCR 相关:TextVQA / OCR-VQA — 测读图中文字的能力
- POPE:测幻觉(hallucination,模型胡编不存在的物体)
核心结论:在多个榜单上超越同期开源 VLM(含 InstructBLIP、Qwen-VL 早期版等),并在部分 benchmark 接近或超过闭源 GPT-4V 当时的水平。具体数字需读原文。
值得注意的消融:
- 单层投影 → 两层 MLP,分数稳定提升
- 加入学术 VQA 数据,对应任务分数大幅上升,但通用对话能力没退化
- 提分辨率 224 → 336,OCR / 细节任务受益最明显
你应该懂的几个新词 — 4-6 个
- Visual Instruction Tuning(视觉指令微调):把"图像 + 任务指令 + 答案"的三元组组织成监督数据,让 VLM 学会按指令完成多样任务,而不只是图像描述
- MLP(Multi-Layer Perceptron,多层感知机):最基础的神经网络结构,多层全连接 + 非线性激活;这里特指视觉特征到 LLM 嵌入空间的两层桥接
- Projector / Connector(投影层 / 连接器):视觉编码器输出和 LLM 输入之间的桥接模块,负责把视觉 token 映射到 LLM 能"听懂"的向量空间;LLaVA 系列的 projector 极简,是其特色
- VQA(Visual Question Answering,视觉问答):给一张图和一个自然语言问题,模型用文字回答;学术上分通用 VQA、OCR-VQA、知识 VQA 等
- Response Format Prompt:在 prompt 末尾加一句格式约束(如"用一个词回答"),让模型在不同 benchmark 输出对的格式;LLaVA-1.5 用这招避免在短答 VQA 上输出长句被判错
- POPE(Polling-based Object Probing Evaluation):一种测多模态幻觉的标准化评测,问模型"图里有没有 X",统计假阳性率
它和其他论文什么关系
- 上游基础:CLIP(视觉编码器)+ LLaMA / Vicuna(语言模型);初代 LLaVA(visual instruction tuning 的开创工作)
- 同期对比:InstructBLIP(更复杂的 Q-Former 配方)/ Qwen-VL(阿里同期开源 VLM,用 cross-attention 桥接)/ MiniGPT-4
- 下游影响:成为开源 VLM 的事实标准 baseline,几乎所有后续工作都会在 LLaVA-1.5 上对比;衍生出 LLaVA-NeXT(1.6)、LLaVA-OneVision、ShareGPT4V、VILA 等一系列工作
- 机器人 / 具身方向:LLaVA 系列的简单架构和开源权重,让它常被当作具身 VLM(如 RoboFlamingo、OpenVLA 早期对比)的视觉理解 backbone
在你的笔记体系里:
我建议这样读 — 3-4 步
- 先扫摘要 + 表 1(大表):直接看 LLaVA-1.5 在哪些 benchmark 上提升最大,建立"它到底强在哪"的直觉
- 读方法节的两个改动:MLP projector 一段 + 数据配方一段,重点看为什么两层 MLP 够、为什么这几类数据有效
- 看消融实验:分辨率、projector、数据三项消融分别贡献了多少分;这是作者给的"配方解构",对你做后续 baseline 改造最有用
- 跳读对话样例:附录里的 demo case 看几个,体会一下 OCR / 推理 / 描述各场景的输出风格
不建议第一次就钻训练超参细节,那部分对理解贡献不大。
为什么值得读
- 开源 VLM 的"标准件":你做 VLM 相关任何研究 / 项目,几乎都会先在 LLaVA-1.5 上跑通再说,先理解它的配方等于理解整个生态的起点
- "少即是多"的代表作:在大家堆复杂结构的 2023 年,它用最简单的 MLP + 加数据打赢,提醒你架构不是一切
- 可复现性:训练成本、数据、代码、权重全公开,是第一个让普通研究者真能在 8×A100 一天复现的 VLM
- 后续工作的对比锚:读 LLaVA-NeXT、Qwen-VL-2、InternVL 等任何后续 VLM 论文,都会反复出现 "vs LLaVA-1.5",理解它能让你看懂 90% 的 VLM 论文比较表
◼
引用本笔记 / Cite this note
@online{eai_llava_1_5_2026,
title = {(readable note) Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning},
author = {Zhou, Jason},
year = {2026},
note = {Note on a 2024 paper},
howpublished = {\url{https://estelledc.github.io/embodied-ai-reading-station/papers/llava-1-5/}},
organization = {Embodied AI Reading Station}
}
All 156 papers (full index)
- 1. LLaVA: Visual Instruction Tuning
- 2. 3DShape2VecSet: 3D Shape Representation for Diffusion Models
- 3. SayCan: Do As I Can, Not As I Say
- 4. OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model
- 5. VLAS: VLA Model With Speech Instructions
- 6. MLA: Multisensory Language-Action Model
- 7. Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control
- 8. CartoRadar: RF-Based 3D SLAM Rivaling Vision Approaches
- 9. mmCLIP: Boosting mmWave-based Zero-shot HAR via Signal-Text Alignment
- 10. mmNorm: Non-Line-of-Sight 3D Object Reconstruction via mmWave Surface Normal Estimation
- 11. Proactive Hearing Assistants that Isolate Egocentric Conversations
- 12. NeuralAids: Wireless Hearables With Programmable Speech AI Accelerators
- 13. Creating speech zones with self-distributing acoustic swarms
- 14. Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation
- 15. SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec
- 16. AudioLM
- 17. Conformer
- 18. Dual-path RNN
- 19. EnCodec
- 20. Meta-StyleSpeech
- 21. MusicLM
- 22. Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision
- 23. SeamlessM4T
- 24. Stable Audio
- 25. Universal Source Separation with Weakly Labelled Data
- 26. Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning
- 27. RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment
- 28. robosuite: A Modular Simulation Framework and Benchmark for Robot Learning
- 29. BridgeData V2
- 30. CALVIN
- 31. LIBERO
- 32. RH20T
- 33. What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation
- 34. DROID
- 35. Open X-Embodiment
- 36. RoboCasa
- 37. SimplerEnv
- 38. Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion
- 39. 3D Diffusion Policy: Generalizable Visuomotor Policy Learning via Simple 3D Representations
- 40. Consistency Policy: Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Consistency Distillation
- 41. EquiBot: SIM(3)-Equivariant Diffusion Policy
- 42. DiT-Policy
- 43. Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization (DPPO)
- 44. Affordance-based Robot Manipulation with Flow Matching
- 45. FlowPolicy: 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching
- 46. FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for VLA
- 47. pi_0: Vision-Language-Action Flow Model
- 48. pi_0.5: VLA with Open-World Generalization
- 49. A Reduction of Imitation Learning and Structured Prediction to No-Regret Online Learning
- 50. Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning
- 51. Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware (ACT/ALOHA)
- 52. AnyTeleop
- 53. Behavior Transformers: Cloning k Modes with One Stone
- 54. Implicit Behavioral Cloning
- 55. RoboCat
- 56. ALOHA 2
- 57. DexCap
- 58. HumanPlus
- 59. Generalizable Humanoid Manipulation with 3D Diffusion Policies (iDP3)
- 60. Mobile ALOHA
- 61. SmolVLA
- 62. Universal Manipulation Interface
- 63. Behavior Generation with Latent Actions (VQ-BeT)
- 64. ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All
- 65. Connecting Touch and Vision via Cross-Modal Prediction
- 66. AnyMAL: An Efficient and Scalable Any-Modality Augmented Language Model
- 67. AudioPaLM
- 68. FROMAGe: Grounding LLMs to Images
- 69. OneLLM
- 70. X-VLM: Multi-Grained Vision Language Pre-Training
- 71. Tactile Beyond Pixels (Sparsh-X)
- 72. Sparsh: Self-supervised Touch Representations
- 73. Tactile-VLA
- 74. TLA: Tactile-Language-Action
- 75. Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control
- 76. Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models
- 77. LLM+P: Empowering LLMs with Optimal Planning
- 78. PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model
- 79. ProgPrompt
- 80. ChatGPT for Robotics
- 81. GenSim
- 82. RoboFlamingo
- 83. Tree-Planner
- 84. VoxPoser
- 85. See Through Smoke: Robust Indoor Mapping with Low-cost mmWave Radar
- 86. Can WiFi Estimate Person Pose?
- 87. 3DRIMR: 3D Reconstruction and Imaging via mmWave Radar based on Deep Learning
- 88. milliEgo: Single-chip mmWave Radar Aided Egomotion Estimation via Deep Sensor Fusion
- 89. High Resolution Point Clouds from mmWave Radar
- 90. RadarSLAM: Radar based Large-Scale SLAM in All Weathers
- 91. Through-Wall Pose Imaging in Real-Time with a Many-to-Many Encoder/Decoder Paradigm
- 92. RFMask: A Simple Baseline for Human Silhouette Segmentation with Radio Signals
- 93. RFPose-OT: RF-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation via Optimal Transport Theory
- 94. Argus: Multi-View Egocentric Human Mesh Reconstruction Based on Stripped-Down Wearable mmWave Add-on
- 95. Diffusion Model is a Good Pose Estimator from 3D RF-Vision
- 96. Enabling Visual Recognition at Radio Frequency (PanoRadar)
- 97. Wave-Former: Through-Occlusion 3D Reconstruction via Wireless Shape Completion
- 98. Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research
- 99. Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning
- 100. DexMV
- 101. Habitat 2.0
- 102. ManiSkill
- 103. ProcTHOR
- 104. SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment
- 105. BEHAVIOR-1K
- 106. Habitat 3.0
- 107. Isaac Lab
- 108. MuJoCo Playground
- 109. RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale
- 110. 3D Diffusion Policy (DP3)
- 111. Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy
- 112. RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control
- 113. RT-Trajectory: Robotic Task Generalization via Hindsight Trajectory Sketches
- 114. 3D-VLA
- 115. DexVLA
- 116. GR-2: Generative Video-Language-Action Model
- 117. OpenHelix
- 118. OpenVLA-OFT
- 119. RDT-1B: Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulation
- 120. RoboMamba
- 121. SpatialVLA
- 122. TinyVLA
- 123. TraceVLA: Visual Trace Prompting
- 124. Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision
- 125. Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning
- 126. BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models
- 127. BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation
- 128. DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding
- 129. EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale
- 130. FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training
- 131. Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks
- 132. InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks
- 133. Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning
- 134. OBELICS
- 135. Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond
- 136. Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training
- 137. What matters when building vision-language models?
- 138. Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling
- 139. The Llama 3 Herd of Models
- 140. LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave
- 141. LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer
- 142. Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP
- 143. Pixtral 12B
- 144. Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination
- 145. World Models
- 146. DayDreamer
- 147. Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models
- 148. Dreamer V3: Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models
- 149. Transformers are Sample-Efficient World Models
- 150. TWM: Transformer-based World Models
- 151. 1X World Model Challenge
- 152. Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform
- 153. GAIA-1
- 154. Genie: Generative Interactive Environments
- 155. Navigation World Models
- 156. UniSim