Pink: Unveiling the Power of Referential Comprehension for Multi-modal LLMs

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various multi-modal tasks. Nevertheless, their performance in fine-grained image understanding tasks is still limited. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new framework that aims to enhance the fine-grained image understanding abilities of MLLMs. Specifically, we present a new method for constructing the instruction tuning dataset at a low cost by leveraging annotations in existing datasets. A self-consistent bootstrapping method is also introduced to extend existing dense object annotations into high-quality referring-expression-bounding-box pairs. These methods enable the generation of high-quality instruction data which includes a wide range of fundamental abilities essential for fine-grained image perception. Moreover, we argue that the visual encoder should be tuned during instruction tuning to mitigate the gap between full image perception and fine-grained image perception. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. For instance, our model exhibits a 5.2% accuracy improvement over Qwen-VL on GQA and surpasses the accuracy of Kosmos-2 by 24.7% on RefCOCO_val. We also attain the top rank on the leaderboard of MMBench. This promising performance is achieved by training on only publicly available data, making it easily reproducible. We will release the models, datasets, and codes for further research.