  Building general-purpose models that can perceive diverse real-world
modalities and solve various tasks is an appealing target in artificial
intelligence. In this paper, we present ChatBridge, a novel multimodal language
model that leverages the expressive capabilities of language as the catalyst to
bridge the gap between various modalities. We show that only language-paired
two-modality data is sufficient to connect all modalities. ChatBridge leverages
recent large language models (LLM) and extends their zero-shot capabilities to
incorporate diverse multimodal inputs. ChatBridge undergoes a two-stage
training. The first stage aligns each modality with language, which brings
emergent multimodal correlation and collaboration abilities. The second stage
instruction-finetunes ChatBridge to align it with user intent with our newly
proposed multimodal instruction tuning dataset, named MULTIS, which covers a
wide range of 16 multimodal tasks of text, image, video, and audio modalities.
We show strong quantitative and qualitative results on zero-shot multimodal
tasks covering text, image, video, and audio modalities. All codes, data, and
models of ChatBridge will be open-sourced.
