Provoking Multi-modal Few-Shot LVLM via Exploration-Exploitation In-Context Learning

In-context learning (ICL), a predominant trend in instruction learning, aims at enhancing the performance of large language models by providing clear task guidance and examples, improving their capability in task understanding and execution. This paper investigates ICL on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) and explores the policies of multi-modal demonstration selection. Existing research efforts in ICL face significant challenges: First, they rely on pre-defined demonstrations or heuristic selecting strategies based on human intuition, which are usually inadequate for covering diverse task requirements, leading to sub-optimal solutions; Second, individually selecting each demonstration fails in modeling the interactions between them, resulting in information redundancy. Unlike these prevailing efforts, we propose a new exploration-exploitation reinforcement learning framework, which explores policies to fuse multi-modal information and adaptively select adequate demonstrations as an integrated whole. The framework allows LVLMs to optimize themselves by continually refining their demonstrations through self-exploration, enabling the ability to autonomously identify and generate the most effective selection policies for in-context learning. Experimental results verify that our approach achieves significant performance improvements on four Visual Question-Answering (VQA) datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing the generalization capability of few-shot LVLMs. The code will be publicly available.