Scalable Vision Language Model Training via High Quality Data Curation

ChaoFeng

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce SAIL-VL (ScAlable Vision Language Model TraIning via High QuaLity Data Curation), an open-source vision language model (VLM) series achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 2B and 8B parameters. The following three key improvements contribute to SAIL-VL's leading performance: (1) Scalable high-quality visual understanding data construction: We implement a data construction pipeline to enable hundred-million-scale high-quality recaption data annotation, and the resulted dataset SAIL-Caption is validated to be of the highest data quality compared with opensource alternatives. (2) Scalable Pretraining with High-Quality Visual Understanding Data: We scale SAIL-VL's pretraining budget up to 655B tokens and show that even a 2B VLM benefits from scaled up training data sizes, exhibiting expected data size scaling laws in visual understanding and instruction following performance. (3) Scalable SFT via data quantity and complexity scaling: We curate a high-quality SFT dataset collection which outperforms opensource alternatives in data quantity scaling effectiveness. We also demonstrate that training with progressively higher-complexity data surpasses baseline one-stage training by a large margin. SAIL-VL series models achieve the highest average score in 18 widely used VLM benchmarks in our evaluation, with the 2B model takes the top position over VLMs of comparable sizes on OpenCompass 2024 (this https URL) demonstrating robust visual comprehension abilities. SAIL-VL series models are released at HuggingFace