Img-Diff: Contrastive Data Synthesis for Multimodal Large Language Models

High-performance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely heavily on data quality. This study introduces a novel data synthesis method, leveraging insights from contrastive learning and image difference captioning to enhance fine-grained image recognition in MLLMs. By analyzing object differences in detailed regions between similar images, we challenge the model to identify both matching and distinct components. Specifically, our method initially create pairs of similar images that highlight object variations. After that, we introduce a Difference Area Generator for object differences identifying, followed by a Difference Captions Generator for differences describing. The outcome is a high-quality dataset of "object replacement" samples, named Img-Diff, which can be expanded as needed due to its automation. We use the generated dataset to finetune state-of-the-art (SOTA) MLLMs such as InternVL2, yielding comprehensive improvements across numerous image difference and Visual Question Answering tasks. For instance, the trained models notably surpass the SOTA models GPT-4V and Gemini on the MMVP benchmark. Additionally, we conduct thorough evaluations to confirm the dataset's diversity, quality, and robustness, presenting several insights on the synthesis of such a contrastive dataset. We release our codes and dataset to encourage further research on multimodal data synthesis and MLLMs' fundamental capabilities for image understanding.