Large multimodal models (LMMs) are important in research because they can process and understand multiple types of data inputs, such as text, images, audio, and video. This ability to integrate and interpret information from different data sources simultaneously allows LMMs to be applied to a wide range of tasks, making them valuable tools in various fields, including healthcare and scientific research. Additionally, LMMs are considered a step towards achieving artificial general intelligence.
Large open-source pre-training datasets are used for training and developing transparent, open-source models in the research community. They are important for exploring data engineering and building strong open-source multimodal models. These datasets contain both images and texts, and are crucial for developing large multimodal models (LMMs) that can perform various tasks such as image classification, text generation, and more6.
Chameleon and MM1 have significantly advanced multimodal models by introducing early-fusion, token-based approaches that can understand and generate images and text in arbitrary sequences. These models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of vision-language tasks, maintaining competitive performance on text-only tasks and showcasing impressive image generation capabilities. These advancements mark a substantial leap forward in the field of multimodal machine learning.