Align$^2$LLaVA: Cascaded Human and Large Language Model Preference Alignment for Multi-modal Instruction Curation

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel instruction curation method for multi-modal large language models that combines human and LLM preference alignment, significantly compressing training data while maintaining or improving model performance.

Contribution

It introduces a dual perspective alignment approach, using human expert criteria and LLM style alignment to create high-quality, compact instruction datasets for MLLMs.

Findings

Compressed training instructions by up to 90%.

Reduced dataset size from 158k to 14k instructions.

Achieved better performance than models trained on full datasets.

Abstract

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as LLaVA-series models, are driven by massive machine-generated instruction-following data tuning. Such automatic instruction collection pipelines, however, inadvertently introduce significant variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel instruction curation algorithm, derived from two unique perspectives, human and LLM preference alignment, to compress this vast corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions to a compact and high-quality form: (i) For human preference alignment, we have collected a machine-generated multimodal instruction dataset and established a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria to guide the data quality assessment critically from human experts. By doing so, a reward model was trained on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of instruction alignment. (ii) For LLM preference alignment, given the instruction selected by the reward model, we propose leveraging the inner LLM used in MLLM to align the writing style of visual instructions with that of the inner LLM itself, resulting in LLM-aligned instruction improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can maintain or even improve model performance by compressing synthetic multimodal instructions by up to 90%. Impressively, by aggressively reducing the training instructions from 158k to 14k (9$\times$ smaller), our model consistently outperforms its full-size dataset counterpart across various MLLM benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/Align2LLaVA.