  Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface
that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion.
However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user
to "point to" and access specific regions within images. This capability is
important not only to support reference-grounded VL benchmarks, but also, for
practical applications that require precise within-image reasoning. We build
Localized Visual Commonsense models, which allow users to specify (multiple)
regions as input. We train our model by sampling localized commonsense
knowledge from a large language model (LLM): specifically, we prompt an LLM to
collect commonsense knowledge given a global literal image description and a
local literal region description automatically generated by a set of VL models.
With a separately trained critic model that selects high-quality examples, we
find that training on the localized commonsense corpus can successfully distill
existing VL models to support a reference-as-input interface. Empirical results
and human evaluations in a zero-shot setup demonstrate that our distillation
method results in more precise VL models of reasoning compared to a baseline of
passing a generated referring expression to an LLM.
