To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.

com/

LLaVAR: A New Model for Text-Rich Image Understanding

Introduction

Text-rich images, such as memes, comics, advertisements, and

infographics, are ubiquitous on the internet and social media. They often
convey complex messages that require both visual and textual
understanding. However, most existing models for text-rich image
understanding are limited by either pre-defined tasks or fixed input
formats. How can we build a more flexible and general model that can
handle various text-rich image understanding tasks with different input
modalities?

A new model is developed by researchers from Georgia Tech, Adobe

Research, and Stanford University. They are experts in natural language
processing, computer vision, and multimodal learning. The motto behind
the development of this model is to create a more general and flexible
model for text-rich image understanding that can handle diverse tasks
and inputs. This new AI model is called 'LLaVAR'.

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

What is LLaVAR?

LLaVAR stands for Language-Level Adaptive Visual Instruction Tuning

for Text-Rich Image Understanding. It is a model that can perform
various text-rich image understanding tasks by taking different types of
inputs, such as images, texts, or both. LLaVAR is based on the idea of
visual instruction tuning (VIT), which is a method of fine-tuning a
pretrained language model (PLM) with visual instructions to adapt it to
different tasks. LLaVAR enhances VIT by introducing language-level
adaptive attention (LLAA), which is a mechanism that dynamically
adjusts the attention weights between the visual and textual inputs
based on the language-level information from the visual instructions.
This allows LLaVAR to better capture the task-specific and input-specific
information and improve the performance.

Key Features of LLaVAR

Some of the key features of LLaVAR are:

● It can handle various text-rich image understanding tasks, such as

meme generation, comic generation, text extraction, sentiment
analysis, text insertion, text deletion, text replacement, and text
style transfer.
● It can take different types of inputs, such as images only, texts
only, or both images and texts. It can also handle multiple images
or texts as inputs.
● It uses visual instructions to guide the model to perform the
desired task and input format. The visual instructions are natural
language texts that are easy to write and understand.
● It leverages LLAA to dynamically adjust the attention weights
between the visual and textual inputs based on the language-level
information from the visual instructions. This allows LLaVAR to

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

better capture the task-specific and input-specific information and

improve the performance.
● It achieves state-of-the-art results on several text-rich image
understanding benchmarks, such as MemeQA, ComicQA,
TextCaps, ST-VQA, OCR-VQA etc.

As an example, Text-based VQA is a task where the model has to

answer questions about images that contain texts, such as signs,
documents, or captions. Researchers tested LLaVAR on four
text-based VQA datasets from different domains: ST-VQA,
OCR-VQA, TextVQA, and DocVQA .They compared LLaVAR with
some baseline models and previous model, LLaVA. Note that one
of the baseline models, InstructBLIP, used OCR-VQA as part of its
training data, so it is not fair to compare it with researcher's models.
They used two different resolutions for the image inputs: 224x224
and 336x336.

source - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.17107.pdf

The results show that LLaVAR improves a lot over LLaVA on all four
datasets, which means that collected data can help the model learn
better. The results also show that LLaVAR does better with higher
resolution images, which means that collected data can help even
more with bigger or clearer images. Model LLaVAR with 336x336
resolution, beats all the other models on three out of four datasets.

But there are some other factors that can affect the performance,
such as the language decoder, the resolution, and the amount of

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

text-image training data. So, researchers can only claim to say that
this model is very good (not the best) for the tasks and datasets that
they evaluated.

Capabilities/Use Case of LLaVAR

LLaVAR has many potential capabilities and use cases for text-rich
image understanding. For example:

● It can generate memes or comics from images or texts or both.

This can be useful for creating humorous or informative content for
social media or entertainment purposes.
● It can extract texts from images or insert texts into images. This
can be useful for extracting information from scanned documents
or adding captions or annotations to images.
● It can analyze the sentiment or emotion of texts or images or both.
This can be useful for understanding the opinions or feelings of
users or customers from their feedback or reviews.
● It can delete or replace texts in images. This can be useful for
removing unwanted or sensitive information from images or
modifying them for different purposes.
● It can transfer the style of texts in images. This can be useful for
changing the tone or mood of texts in images or making them
more appealing or persuasive.

How does LLaVAR work?

LLaVAR is based on LLaVA, which is a model that uses visual instruction

tuning to adapt a pretrained language model to different text-rich image
understanding tasks. LLaVAR enhances LLaVA by introducing
language-level adaptive attention, which dynamically adjusts the
attention weights between the visual and textual inputs based on the
language-level information from the visual instructions.

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

LLaVAR consists of two main components: a visual encoder and a

language decoder. The visual encoder processes the image input and
extracts visual features. The language decoder generates or predicts the
text output based on the visual features and the text input.

The visual encoder is based on CLIP-ViT-L/14, which is a vision

transformer that is pretrained on large-scale image-text pairs. Depending
on the resolution of the image input, LLaVAR uses either 224x224 or
336x336 as the input size. The visual encoder outputs a sequence of
grid features that represent the local regions of the image. These grid
features are then projected into the word embedding space of the
language decoder by a trainable matrix.

The language decoder is based on Vicuna-13B, which is a large-scale

language model that is fine-tuned with visual instructions. The language
decoder takes the visual instruction, the text input, and the projected grid
features as inputs and encodes them into a sequence of embeddings.
The language decoder then uses masked self-attention and
cross-attention layers to generate or predict the text output token by
token. The language decoder also uses language-level adaptive
attention to modify the attention weights between the visual and textual
inputs based on the visual instruction.

How to Access and Use LLaVAR?

LLaVAR is an open-source model that can be accessed and used in

different ways, depending on your needs and preferences. Here are
some of the options you have:

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

source - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.17107.pdf

You can use the online demo of LLaVAR to try out some of the text-rich
image understanding tasks, such as meme generation, comic
generation, text extraction, and sentiment analysis. The demo allows you
to upload your own images or texts or use the provided samples (as
shown in above figure). The demo will show you the output of LLaVAR
for the given task and input.

The GitHub repository for LLaVAR contains all the necessary resources
to run the model on a variety of text-rich image understanding tasks. You
can download the code, data, and pretrained models, and then run the
provided scripts to fine-tune and evaluate the model on your own tasks.
You can also modify the scripts or the visual instructions to customize
your experiments.

If you are interested to learn more about the LLaVAR model, all relevant
links are provided at the end of this article.

Limitations

LLaVAR is an amazing model for text-rich image understanding, but it

also has some room for improvement. Here are some of the challenges
that LLaVAR faces:

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/

● LLaVAR needs visual instructions to tell it what to do and how to

do it. But writing visual instructions can be hard and
time-consuming, especially for new or complicated tasks. Also,
visual instructions can be vague or confusing, which can mess up
the model.
● LLaVAR uses a PLM to learn from a lot of text data. But PLMs may
not understand all the visual details or meanings that matter for
text-rich image understanding tasks. Also, PLMs are very big and
slow and need a lot of power to work.
● LLaVAR uses LLAA to change the attention weights between the
visual and textual inputs based on the visual instructions. But
LLAA may not always find the best attention weights for different
tasks or inputs, especially when there are too many or conflicting
visual instructions or inputs.

Conclusion

LLaVAR is a breakthrough model that can advance AI research and

applications in text-rich image understanding and multimodal learning.

source
research paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17107
project details - https://llavar.github.io/
Github repo - https://github.com/SALT-NLP/LLaVAR
demo link- https://eba470c07c805702b8.gradio.live/

To read more such articles, please visit our blog https://socialviews81.blogspot.com/