Augmenting pretrained language models (LMs) with a vision encoder (e.g., Flamingo) has obtained state-of-the-art results in image-to-text generation. However, these models store all the knowledge within their parameters, thus often requiring enormous model parameters to model the abundant visual concepts and very rich textual descriptions. Additionally, they are inefficient in incorporating new data, requiring a computational-expensive fine-tuning process. In this work, we introduce a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model, Re-ViLM, built upon the Flamingo, that supports retrieving the relevant knowledge from the external database for zero and in-context few-shot image-to-text generations. By storing certain knowledge explicitly in the external database, our approach reduces the number of model parameters and can easily accommodate new data during evaluation by simply updating the database. We also construct an interleaved image and text data that facilitates in-context few-shot learning capabilities. We demonstrate that Re-ViLM significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks, especially for zero-shot and few-shot generation in out-of-domain settings with 4 times less parameters compared with baseline methods.

本研究提出了一种基于Flamingo模型的Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model（Re-ViLM）, 支持检索外部数据库的相关知识，减少模型参数数量，适应新数据评估。研究表明，Re-ViLM显著提高了图像到文本生成任务的性能，在没有领域内数据和少量领域内数据的情况下，参数数量是基线方法的四倍。

Re-ViLM: 检索增强的视觉语言模型，用于零和少量样本图像字幕生成