LIVE: Learnable In-Context Vector for Visual Question Answering

TL;DR

The paper introduces LIVE, a learnable in-context vector method that improves visual question answering in multimodal models by reducing computational costs and increasing accuracy through distilled task information.

Contribution

LIVE is a novel learnable in-context vector that effectively distills task information, addressing challenges of efficiency and performance in multimodal in-context learning.

Findings

LIVE reduces inference time compared to traditional ICL.

LIVE improves accuracy on VQA tasks over non-learnable ICV methods.

LIVE demonstrates effectiveness in complex multimodal tasks.

Abstract

As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these techniques to develop Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, applying ICL usually faces two major challenges: 1) using more ICDs will largely increase the inference time and 2) the performance is sensitive to the selection of ICDs. These challenges are further exacerbated in LMMs due to the integration of multiple data types and the combinational complexity of multimodal ICDs. Recently, to address these challenges, some NLP studies introduce non-learnable In-Context Vectors (ICVs) which extract useful task information from ICDs into a single vector and then insert it into the LLM to help solve the corresponding task. However, although useful in simple NLP tasks, these non-learnable methods fail to handle complex multimodal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA). In this study, we propose Learnable In-Context VEctor (LIVE) to distill essential task information from demonstrations, improving ICL performance in LMMs. Experiments show that LIVE can significantly reduce computational costs while enhancing accuracy in VQA tasks compared to traditional ICL and other non-learnable ICV methods. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ForJadeForest/LIVE-Learnable-In-Context-Vector}.