Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World

We introduce Kosmos-2, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), enabling new capabilities of perceiving object descriptions (e.g., bounding boxes) and grounding text to the visual world. Specifically, we represent text spans (i.e., referring expressions and noun phrases) as links in Markdown, i.e., text span, where object descriptions are sequences of location tokens. To train the model, we construct a large-scale dataset about grounded image-text pairs (GrIT) together with multimodal corpora. In addition to the existing capabilities of MLLMs (e.g., perceiving general modalities, following instructions, and performing in-context learning), Kosmos-2 integrates the grounding capability to downstream applications, while maintaining the conventional capabilities of MLLMs (e.g., perceiving general modalities, following instructions, and performing in-context learning). Kosmos-2 is evaluated on a wide range of tasks, including (i) multimodal grounding, such as referring expression comprehension and phrase grounding, (ii) multimodal referring, such as referring expression generation, (iii) perception-language tasks, and (iv) language understanding and generation. This study sheds a light on the big convergence of language, multimodal perception, and world modeling, which is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. Code can be found in https://aka.ms/kosmos-2.