VaPR -- Vision-language Preference alignment for Reasoning

Abstract

Preference finetuning methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with AI-generated feedback have shown promise in aligning Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with human preferences. However, existing techniques overlook the prevalence of noise in synthetic preference annotations in the form of stylistic and length biases. To this end, we introduce a hard-negative response generation framework based on LLM-guided response editing, that produces rejected responses with targeted errors, maintaining stylistic and length similarity to the accepted ones. Using this framework, we develop the VaPR dataset, comprising 30K high-quality samples, to finetune three LVLM families: LLaVA-V1.5, Qwen2VL & Qwen2.5VL (2B-13B sizes). Our VaPR models deliver significant performance improvements across ten benchmarks, achieving average gains of 6.5% (LLaVA), 4.0% (Qwen2VL), and 1.5% (Qwen2.5VL), with notable improvements on reasoning tasks. A scaling analysis shows that performance consistently improves with data size, with LLaVA models benefiting even at smaller scales. Moreover, VaPR reduces the tendency to answer "Yes" in binary questions - addressing a common failure mode in LVLMs like LLaVA. Lastly, we show that the framework generalizes to open-source LLMs as editors, with models trained on VaPR-OS achieving ~99% of the performance of models trained on \name, which is synthesized using GPT-4o. Our data, models, and code can be found on the project page https://vap-r.github.io