  Instruction tuning unlocks the superior capability of Large Language Models
(LLM) to interact with humans. Furthermore, recent instruction-following
datasets include images as visual inputs, collecting responses for image-based
instructions. However, visual instruction-tuned models cannot comprehend
textual details within images well. This work enhances the current visual
instruction tuning pipeline with text-rich images (e.g., movie posters, book
covers, etc.). Specifically, we first use publicly available OCR tools to
collect results on 422K text-rich images from the LAION dataset. Moreover, we
prompt text-only GPT-4 with recognized texts and image captions to generate 16K
conversations, each containing question-answer pairs for text-rich images. By
combining our collected data with previous multi-modal instruction-following
data, our model, LLaVAR, substantially improves the LLaVA model's capability on
text-based VQA datasets (up to 20% accuracy improvement) while achieving an
accuracy of 91.42% on ScienceQA. The GPT-4-based instruction-following
evaluation also demonstrates the improvement of our model on both natural
images and text-rich images. Through qualitative analysis, LLaVAR shows
promising interaction (e.g., reasoning, writing, and elaboration) skills with
humans based on the latest real-world online content that combines text and
images. We make our code/data/models publicly available at
https://llavar.github.io/.
