Towards Self-Refinement of Vision-Language Models with Triangular Consistency

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) integrate visual knowledge with the analytical capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through supervised visual instruction tuning, using image-question-answer triplets. However, the potential of VLMs trained without supervised instruction remains largely unexplored. This study validates that VLMs possess inherent self-refinement capabilities, enabling them to generate high-quality supervised data without external inputs and thereby learn autonomously. Specifically, to stimulate the self-refinement ability of VLMs, we propose a self-refinement framework based on a Triangular Consistency principle: within the image-query-answer triangle, any masked elements should be consistently and accurately reconstructed. The framework involves three steps: (1) We enable the instruction generation ability of VLMs by adding multi-task instruction tuning like image→question-answer or image-answer→question. (2) We generate image-query-answer triplets from unlabeled images and use the Triangular Consistency principle for filtering. (3) The model is further updated using the filtered synthetic data. To investigate the underlying mechanisms behind this selfrefinement capability, we conduct a theoretical analysis from a causal perspective. Using the widely recognized LLaVA-1.5 as our baseline, our experiments reveal that the model can autonomously achieve consistent, though deliberately modest, improvements across multiple benchmarks without any external supervision, such as human annotations or environmental feedback. We expect that the insights of this study on the self-refinement ability of VLMs can inspire future research on the learning mechanism of VLMs. Code is available at SRF-LLaVA.

Acquiring supervised data with high-quality annotations is crucial for the success of visual instruction tuning. However, compiling visual instructions, such as image-question-answer triplets, is non-trivial. Such data cannot be directly crawled from the web and requires human involvement, making the process both challenging and costly. Careless data collection may lead to copyright issues. These factors motivate researchers to leverage synthetic data instead.

39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025).