A Large-Scale Synthetic Multi-Turn Question-Answering Dataset for Scientific Graphs

In this work, we present SciGraphQA, a synthetic multi-turn question-answer dataset related to academic graphs. SciGraphQA is 13 times larger than ChartVQA, the previously largest chart-visual question-answering dataset. It is also the largest open-sourced chart VQA dataset with non-synthetic charts. To build our dataset, we selected 290,000 Computer Science or Machine Learning ArXiv papers published between 2010 and 2020, and then used Palm-2 to generate 295K samples of open- vocabulary multi-turn question-answering dialogues about the graphs. As context, we provided the text-only Palm-2 with paper title, abstract, paragraph mentioning the graph, and rich text contextual data from the graph itself, obtaining dialogues with an average 2.23 question-answer turns for each graph. We asked GPT-4 to assess the matching quality of our question-answer turns given the paper’s context, obtaining an average rating of 8.7/10 on our 3K test set. We evaluated the 0-shot capability of the most popular MLLM models such as LLaVa, mPLUGowl, BLIP-2, and openFlamingo’s on our dataset, finding LLaVA-13B being the most performant with a CIDEr score of 0.08. We further enriched the question prompts for LLAVA by including the serialized data tables extracted from the graphs using the DePlot model, boosting LLaVA’s 0-shot CIDEr to 0.15. To verify the validity of our dataset, we also fine-tuned LLaVa using our dataset, reaching a substantially higher CIDEr score of 0.26. We anticipate further accuracy improvement by including segmentation mask tokens and leveraging larger LLM backbones coupled with emergent prompting techniques.

[Arxiv paper] [Training Dataset] [Test Dataset] [Model] [PaperWithCode Benchmark]

@misc{li2023scigraphqa,
  title={SciGraphQA: A Large-Scale Synthetic Multi-Turn Question-Answering Dataset for Scientific Graphs}, 
  author={Shengzhi Li and Nima Tajbakhsh},
  year={2023},
  eprint={2308.03349},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

Usage and License Notices: The data, code and checkpoint is intended and licensed for research use only. They are also restricted to uses that follow the license agreement of Palm-2, LLaMA and GPT-4. If you find our work useful, please consider citing us using

Contents

• Data Download
• Install
• LLaVA-GRAPH Weights
• Serving
• Evaluation
• Fine-tuning

Data

Data file name	Size
[SciGraphQA-295K]	771 MB (excluding images)
[SciGraphQA-3K-test]	8.4 MB (excluding images)
[SciGraphQA-30K-DePlot-augmented-subset]	8.4 MB (excluding images)

Related datasets

Datasets	Figure Count	Data/Chart generation process	Question-Answer pair count	Question generation	Answer Type	# Plot types
FigureQA (Kahou et al. 2017)	180K	Synthetic data and charts	2.3M	From 15 templates	Fixed voca.	4
DVQA (Kafle et al. 2018)	300K	Synthetic data and synthetic charts	3.4M	From 26 templates	Fixed vocab.	1
PlotQA (Methani et al. 2020)	224K	Real-world data and synthetic charts	28M	From 76 templates	Mix of fixed and open vocabulary answers.	3
ChartQA (Masry et al. 2022)	21.9K (4.8K human and 17.1K generated)	Real-world charts from a web crawl	32.7K (9.6K human and 23.1k generated)	Human/Machine generated	Open Vocabulary	Unbounded (real-world charts)
SciGraphQA (ours)	295K	Real-world academic graphs	657K	Machine Generated with Palm with additional textual context	Open Vocabulary	Unbounded (real-world charts)

Generation process

Illustration of multi-turn dialogue generation process. For higher quality dialogues, we use comprehensive textual context together with in-context learning when prompting Palm-2.

(left) distribution of the number of question-answer turns in our SciGraphQA dataset. (right) distribution of GPT-4 ratings (0--10) when GPT-4 was used as a judge to measure the matching of questions and answers from a 3k subset of the the SciGraphQA dataset.

Examples from our SciGraphQA dataset where questions and answers are both generated using a commercial LLM rather than being selected from a fixed, limited template pool. Note how the questions are specific to the graphs and often have a conversational nature, asking to elaborate on a concept mentioned in previous answer. For brevity, some answers are truncated, denoted by ``...`` at the end.

Leaderboard

Model Name	Finetuned on SciGraphQA?	Prompt Augmented with extracted data-table	CIDEr	BLEU(4)	ROUGE
BLIP2-2.7B	No	No	0.007	0.003	0.1
DePlot+mPLUG-owl-7B	No	Yes	0.037	0.058	0.22
mPLUG-owl-7B	No	No	0.04	0.062	0.22
LLaVa-7B	No	No	0.048	0.07	0.18
LLaVa-13B	No	No	0.08	0.07	0.23
OpenFlamingo v2-7B	No	No	0.12	0.081	0.22
DePlot+GPT-3	No	Yes	0.13	0.098	0.226
DePlot+LLaVa-13B	No	Yes	0.153	0.106	0.273
DePlot+SciGrahQA-baseline	Yes	Yes	0.268	0.123	0.31

Install

1. Clone this repository and navigate to LLaVA folder

git clone https://github.com/findalexli/LLaVA-Graph
cd LLaVA-Graph

2. Install Package

conda create -n llava python=3.10 -y
conda activate llava
pip install --upgrade pip  # enable PEP 660 support
pip install -e .
pip install ninja
pip install flash-attn==1.0.2

LLaVA Weights

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("alexshengzhili/LLaVa-graph-caption-to-paragraph")

LLaVA pretrained projector weights

The initial release is pretrained on [SciCapPlus] with 1 epoch. The pretrained weights are released here.

Serving

Web UI

Launch a controller

python -m llava.serve.controller --host 0.0.0.0 --port 10000

Launch a model worker

python -m llava.serve.model_worker --host 0.0.0.0 --controller http://localhost:10000 --port 40000 --worker http://localhost:40000 --model-path alexshengzhili/LLaVa-graph-caption-to-paragraph --multi-modal

Wait until the process finishes loading the model and you see "Uvicorn running on ...".

Launch a model worker (Multiple GPUs, when GPU VRAM <= 24GB)

If your the VRAM of your GPU is less than 24GB (e.g., RTX 3090, RTX 4090, etc.), you may try running it with multiple GPUs.

python -m llava.serve.model_worker --host 0.0.0.0 --controller http://localhost:10000 --port 40000 --worker http://localhost:40000 --model-path alexshengzhili/LLaVa-graph-caption-to-paragraph --multi-modal --num-gpus 2

Wait until the process finishes loading the model and you see "Uvicorn running on ...".

Launch a gradio web server.

python -m llava.serve.gradio_web_server --controller http://localhost:10000

You can open your browser and chat with a model now.

Code and Hyperparameters

We fine-tune the model using the code from FastChat. We use a similar set of hyperparameters as Vicuna in finetuning. Both hyperparameters used in pretraining and finetuning are provided below.

1. Pretraining

Hyperparameter	Global Batch Size	Learning rate	Epochs	Max length	Weight decay
LLaVA-13B	128	2e-3	1	2048	0

2. Finetuning

Hyperparameter	Global Batch Size	Learning rate	Epochs	Max length	Weight decay
LLaVA-13B	32	2e-5	3	2048	0

Fine-tuning with Local GPUs

LLaVA-Graph is trained on 8 A100 GPUs with 80GB memory with the following code. To train on fewer GPUs, you can reduce the per_device_train_batch_size and increase the gradient_accumulation_steps accordingly to keep the global batch size the same.

1. Pretraining

Pretrain: LLaVA-13B, 8x A100 (80G). Time: ~4 hours.

torchrun --nnodes=1 --nproc_per_node=8 --master_port=25001 \
    llava/train/train_mem.py \
    --model_name_or_path ./checkpoints/llama-vicuna-13b \
    --data_path /path/to/cc3m_595k.json \
    --image_folder /path/to/cc3m_595k \
    --vision_tower openai/clip-vit-large-patch14 \
    --tune_mm_mlp_adapter True \
    --mm_vision_select_layer -2 \
    --mm_use_im_start_end \
    --bf16 True \
    --output_dir ./checkpoints/llava-13b-pretrain \
    --num_train_epochs 1 \
    --per_device_train_batch_size 16 \
    --per_device_eval_batch_size 4 \
    --gradient_accumulation_steps 1 \
    --evaluation_strategy "no" \
    --save_strategy "steps" \
    --save_steps 2400 \
    --save_total_limit 1 \
    --learning_rate 2e-3 \
    --weight_decay 0. \
    --warmup_ratio 0.03 \
    --lr_scheduler_type "cosine" \
    --logging_steps 1 \
    --tf32 True \
    --model_max_length 2048 \
    --gradient_checkpointing True \
    --lazy_preprocess True \
    --report_to wandb

You may run this with a single A100 GPU with the following code. Please note that the per_device_train_batch_size * gradient_accumulation_steps should be equal to 128 to keep the global batch size the same.

Pretrain: LLaVA-7B, 1x A100 (80G/40G). Time: ~19 hours.

python llava/train/train_mem.py \
    --model_name_or_path ./checkpoints/llama-vicuna-7b \
    --data_path /path/to/cc3m_595k.json \
    --image_folder /path/to/cc3m_595k \
    --vision_tower openai/clip-vit-large-patch14 \
    --tune_mm_mlp_adapter True \
    --mm_vision_select_layer -2 \
    --mm_use_im_start_end \
    --bf16 True \
    --output_dir ./checkpoints/llava-7b-pretrain \
    --num_train_epochs 1 \
    --per_device_train_batch_size 16 \
    --per_device_eval_batch_size 4 \
    --gradient_accumulation_steps 8 \
    --evaluation_strategy "no" \
    --save_strategy "steps" \
    --save_steps 2400 \
    --save_total_limit 1 \
    --learning_rate 2e-3 \
    --weight_decay 0. \
    --warmup_ratio 0.03 \
    --lr_scheduler_type "cosine" \
    --logging_steps 1 \
    --tf32 True \
    --model_max_length 2048 \
    --gradient_checkpointing True \
    --lazy_preprocess True \
    --report_to wandb

Acknowledgement

• [LLaVA] which the codebase we built on
• Vicuna: the codebase we built upon, and our base model Vicuna-13B that has the amazing language capabilities!

Related Projects

• Instruction Tuning with GPT-4
• LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day
• Otter: In-Context Multi-Modal Instruction Tuning

For future project ideas, pleae check out:

• SEEM: Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Grounded-Segment-Anything to detect, segment, and generate anything by marrying Grounding DINO and Segment-Anything.