DRUM: Learning Demonstration Retriever for Large MUlti-modal Models
Ellen Yi-Ge, Jiechao Gao, Wei Han, Wei Zhu · 2025
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in dealing with new tasks with the help of in-context learning (ICL).In the study of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), when implementing ICL, researchers usually adopt the naive strategies like fixed demonstrations across different samples, or selecting demonstrations directly via a visual-language embedding model.These methods do not guarantee the configured demonstrations fit the need of the LVLMs.To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, demonstration retriever for large multimodal model (DRUM), which fine-tunes the CLIP embedding model to better meet the LVLM's needs.First, we discuss the retrieval strategies for a visual-language task, assuming an embedding model is given.And we propose to concate the image and text embeddings to enhance the retrieval performance.Second, we propose to re-rank the the embedding model's retrieved demonstrations via the LVLM's feedbacks, and calculate a list-wise ranking loss for training the embedding model.Third, we propose an iterative demonstration mining strategy to improve the training of the embedding model.Through extensive experiments on 3 types of visual-language tasks, 7 benchmark datasets, our DRUM framework is proven to be effective in boosting the LVLM's in-context learning performance via retrieving more proper demonstrations.