README.md

---
license: apache-2.0
datasets:
- FreedomIntelligence/ALLaVA-4V
- Vision-Flan/vision-flan_191-task_1k
language:
- en
base_model:
- Lin-Chen/open-llava-next-llama3-8b
---
# Adapting Multimodal Large Language Models to Domains via Post-Training (EMNLP 2025)

This repos contains the **visual-instruction synthesizer** in our paper: [On Domain-Specific Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://huggingface.co/papers/2411.19930).

The main project page is: [Adapt-MLLM-to-Domains](https://huggingface.co/AdaptLLM/Adapt-MLLM-to-Domains)

### 1. Basic Usage: Synthesize a task triplet based on a given image-caption pair
To synthesize an "instruction-informative response-precise response" triplet based on the following image-caption pair.

<p align='left'>
    <img src="/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn-uploads.huggingface.co%2Fproduction%2Fuploads%2F650801ced5578ef7e20b33d4%2FmgI_Ayj12_Q_kviWvfAVb.jpeg%26quot%3B width="200">
</p>

<details>
<summary> Click to expand </summary>

```python
from transformers import LlavaNextProcessor, LlavaNextForConditionalGeneration
import torch
from PIL import Image
import requests

# Define your input image-caption pair here:
## image 
url = "/static-proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn-uploads.huggingface.co%2Fproduction%2Fuploads%2F650801ced5578ef7e20b33d4%2FmgI_Ayj12_Q_kviWvfAVb.jpeg%26quot%3B%3C%2Fspan%3E%3C!----%3E%3C%2Ftd%3E%3C%2Ftr%3E%3Ctr id="L36">
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw).convert("RGB")

## Caption
caption = "Dish: Strawberry Waffles\n\nSteps to prepare:\na). Preheat and grease a waffle iron according to manufacturer's instructions.\nb). Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl. Whisk buttermilk, yogurt, butter, eggs, and sugar together in a separate bowl; stir into flour mixture until batter is smooth. Fold strawberries into batter.\nc). Pour about 1/3 cup batter into preheated waffle iron; cook until lightly browned, 5 to 7 minutes. Repeat with remaining batter.\n\nIngredients you'll need:\n(a). 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour\n(b). 4 teaspoons baking powder\n(c). 3/4 teaspoon salt\n(d). 2 cups buttermilk\n(e). 1/2 cup vanilla Greek-style yogurt\n(f). 1/2 cup butter, melted\n(g). 2 eggs, beaten\n(h). 1 1/2 tablespoons white sugar\n(i). 3/4 cup chopped strawberries, or more to taste"

# =========================== Do NOT need to modify the following ===============================

# Path to synthesizer
model_path = "AdaptLLM/visual-instruction-synthesizer"

# Prompt Hints
caption_hint = "Describe the image."
precise_hint = "Answer with a precise response.\n"
informative_hint = "Answer with an informative response.\n"

# Function to parse predictions
def parse_pred(pred):
    if not pred.endswith("<|end_of_text|>"):
        return []

    pred = pred[:-len("<|end_of_text|>")]

    QA_str_list = pred.split("<|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\n")
    if not pred.endswith("<|eot_id|>"):
        QA_str_list = QA_str_list[:-1]

    QA_list = []
    for QA_str in QA_str_list:
        try:
            assert "<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n" in QA_str
            Q_str, A_str = QA_str.split("<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n")
            Q_str, A_str = Q_str.strip(), A_str[:-len("<|eot_id|>")].strip()
            assert Q_str and A_str
            QA_list.append({"Q": Q_str, "A": A_str})
        except AssertionError:
            pass  # Skip invalid entries

    conversations = []
    for qa_entry in QA_list:
        conversations.append({"from": "human", "value": qa_entry["Q"]})
        conversations.append({"from": "gpt", "value": qa_entry["A"]})
    return conversations

# Function to extract task triplets
def get_task_triplet(pred):
    pred_QAs = parse_pred(pred)
    precise_QAs = {}
    informative_QAs = {}
    collected_QA = None

    for idx in range(0, len(pred_QAs), 2):  # Iterate over question-answer pairs
        question = pred_QAs[idx]["value"]
        answer = pred_QAs[idx + 1]["value"]
        if question.startswith(precise_hint):
            precise_q = question[len(precise_hint):]
            if precise_q in informative_QAs:
                collected_QA = {
                    "Q": precise_q,
                    "precise_A": answer,
                    "informative_A": informative_QAs[precise_q],
                }
                break
            else:
                precise_QAs[precise_q] = answer
        elif question.startswith(informative_hint):
            informative_q = question[len(informative_hint):]
            if informative_q in precise_QAs:
                collected_QA = {
                    "Q": informative_q,
                    "precise_A": precise_QAs[informative_q],
                    "informative_A": answer,
                }
                break
            else:
                informative_QAs[informative_q] = answer

    return collected_QA

# Load the processor
processor = LlavaNextProcessor.from_pretrained(model_path)

# Define image token
image_token = "<|reserved_special_token_4|>"

# Format the prompt
prompt = (
    f"<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>\n\n"
    f"You are a helpful language and vision assistant. You are able to understand the visual content that the user provides, and assist the user with a variety of tasks using natural language."
    f"<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\n"
    f"{image_token}\n{caption_hint}<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>\n\n"
    f"{caption}<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>\n\n"
)

# Load the model
model = LlavaNextForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(model_path, torch_dtype=torch.float16, device_map="auto")

# Prepare inputs and generate output
inputs = processor(images=image, text=prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
answer_start = int(inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1])
output = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=512)

# Decode predictions
pred = processor.decode(output[0][answer_start:], skip_special_tokens=False)
print(f"## Synthesizer predictions:\n{pred}")

# Extract task triplets
task_triplet = get_task_triplet(pred)
print(f"## Synthesized Task triplet:\n{task_triplet}")
```
</details>

### 2. Advanced Usage: Convert Image-Caption Pairs into Visual Instructions at Scale
The following steps show how to convert your own data into visual instructions for post-training MLLMs. 

We leverage vLLM to accelerate the synthesis process. On a single A100-80GB GPU, it takes about 12.5 hours to convert 100K image-caption pairs.

<details>
<summary> Click to expand </summary>

### 1) Setup
Install vLLM using `pip` or [from source](https://vllm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started/installation.html#build-from-source).  
```bash
pip install vllm
```

Clone our code repository and navigate to the inference directory:
```bash
git clone https://github.com/bigai-ai/QA-Synthesizer.git
cd QA-Synthesizer/vllm_inference
SYNTHESIZER=AdaptLLM/visual-instruction-synthesizer
CONSISTENCY_CHECKER=meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B  # Language model for consistency checks  
```  

### 2) Prepare Your Image-Caption Pairs
Format your `image_caption_pairs` file to match the following structure (similar to ShareGPT), or you can use our [data_samples/image_caption_pairs.json](https://github.com/bigai-ai/QA-Synthesizer/blob/main/data_samples/image_caption_pairs.json) for a quick try.

```json
[
  {
    "images": ["image_xxx.jpg"],
    "messages": [
      {
        "content": "<image>instruction",
        "role": "user"
      },
      {
        "content": "response",
        "role": "assistant"
      }
    ]
  },
  ...
]
```

### 3) Run Synthesis

The following command generate task triplets using the synthesizer and apply consistency-based filtering to enhance data quality:

```bash  
IMAGE_CAPTION='../data_samples/image_caption_pairs.json'  # Path to image-caption pairs  
IMAGE_FOLDER='../data_samples/images'  # Path to the image folder  
OUTPUT_DIR='../data_samples/'  # Output directory for synthesized data  

# Run synthesis with data parallelism; adjust CUDA devices as needed:
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES='0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7' bash run_synthesis.sh ${SYNTHESIZER} ${CONSISTENCY_CHECKER} ${IMAGE_CAPTION} ${IMAGE_FOLDER} ${OUTPUT_DIR}  
```  

The synthesized output will be saved at:  
```bash
${OUTPUT_DIR}/image_caption_and_synthetic_task.json
```  

This output can be directly utilized for single-stage post-training with code repo like [LLaMA-Factory](https://github.com/hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory).  

</details>


## Citation
If you find our work helpful, please cite us.

[Adapt MLLM to Domains](https://huggingface.co/papers/2411.19930) (EMNLP 2025 Findings)
```bibtex
@article{adamllm,
  title={On Domain-Adaptive Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models},
  author={Cheng, Daixuan and Huang, Shaohan and Zhu, Ziyu and Zhang, Xintong and Zhao, Wayne Xin and Luan, Zhongzhi and Dai, Bo and Zhang, Zhenliang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.19930},
  year={2024}
}
```

[Adapt LLM to Domains](https://huggingface.co/papers/2309.09530) (ICLR 2024)
```bibtex
@inproceedings{
cheng2024adapting,
title={Adapting Large Language Models via Reading Comprehension},
author={Daixuan Cheng and Shaohan Huang and Furu Wei},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=y886UXPEZ0}
}
```