  High-quality instructions and responses are essential for the zero-shot
performance of large language models on interactive natural language tasks. For
interactive vision-language tasks involving intricate visual scenes, a large
quantity of diverse and creative instruction-response pairs should be
imperative to tune vision-language models (VLMs). Nevertheless, the current
availability of vision-language instruction-response pairs in terms of
quantity, diversity, and creativity remains limited, posing challenges to the
generalization of interactive VLMs. Here we present MultI-Modal In-Context
Instruction Tuning (MIMIC-IT), a dataset comprising 2.8 million multimodal
instruction-response pairs, with 2.2 million unique instructions derived from
images and videos. Each pair is accompanied by multi-modal in-context
information, forming conversational contexts aimed at empowering VLMs in
perception, reasoning, and planning. The instruction-response collection
process, dubbed as Syphus, is scaled using an automatic annotation pipeline
that combines human expertise with GPT's capabilities. Using the MIMIC-IT
dataset, we train a large VLM named Otter. Based on extensive evaluations
conducted on vision-language benchmarks, it has been observed that Otter
demonstrates remarkable proficiency in multi-modal perception, reasoning, and
in-context learning. Human evaluation reveals it effectively aligns with the
user's intentions. We release the MIMIC-IT dataset, instruction-response
collection pipeline, benchmarks, and the Otter model.
