Tackling Vision Language Tasks through Learning Inner Monologues

Visual language tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) or Visual Entailment (VE) require AI models to comprehend and reason with both visual and textual content. Driven by the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), two prominent methods have emerged: (1) the hybrid integration between LLMs and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), where visual inputs are firstly converted into language descriptions by VLMs, serving as inputs for LLMs to generate final answer(s); (2) visual feature alignment in language space, where visual inputs are encoded as embeddings and projected to LLMs' language space via further supervised fine-tuning. The first approach provides light training costs and interpretability but is hard to be optimized in an end-to-end fashion. The second approach presents decent performance, but feature alignment usually requires large amounts of training data and lacks interpretability. To tackle this dilemma, we propose a novel approach, Inner Monologue Multi-Modal Optimization (IMMO), to solve complex vision language problems by simulating Inner Monologue, a cognitive process in which an individual engages in silent verbal communication with themselves. More specifically, we enable LLMs and VLMs to interact through natural language conversation (i.e., Inner Monologue) and propose to use a two-stage training process to learn how to do Inner Monologue (self-asking questions and answering questions). IMMO is evaluated on two popular tasks and achieves competitive performance with less training data when compared with state-of-the-art models while concurrently keeping the interpretability. The results suggest that by emulating the cognitive phenomenon of internal dialogue, our approach can enhance reasoning and explanation abilities, contributing to the more effective fusion of vision and language models. More importantly, instead of using predefined human-crafted monologues, IMMO learns this process within the deep learning models, broadening its potential applications across various AI challenges beyond vision and language tasks.