DICS: Exploring Data Intrinsic Consistency for Visual Instruction Selection

Yuyang Hong, Jinhui Guo, Jiaqi Gu, Lubin Fan, Ruixiang Wang, Kun Ding, Yue Wu, Shiming Xiang, Jieping Ye


Abstract
Visual instruction tuning is crucial for advancing the vision-language alignment and instruction-following capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, identifying optimal subsets under a fixed ratio constraint from rapidly expanding datasets remains a significant bottleneck. While existing methods largely depend on distribution diversity or heuristic filtering, they often overlook the internal coherence within individual samples. To bridge this gap, we propose Data Intrinsic Consistency (DIC), a self-scoring metric designed to quantify the sample-level inter-component consistency. DIC consists of two modules: Visual Information Consistency (VIC), evaluating the alignment between visual content and instructions, and Response Information Consistency (RIC), assessing response coherence relative to the instruction. Building upon DIC, we introduce Data Intrinsic Consistency Selection (DICS), an adaptive data selection method that optimizes the trade-off between high intra-sample consistency and global distributional diversity under varying data budgets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DICS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse dataset scales and model architectures, surpassing full-dataset fine-tuning while using only 25% of the LLaVA-1.5-665K data.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.163
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3452–3472
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.163/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuyang Hong, Jinhui Guo, Jiaqi Gu, Lubin Fan, Ruixiang Wang, Kun Ding, Yue Wu, Shiming Xiang, and Jieping Ye. 2026. DICS: Exploring Data Intrinsic Consistency for Visual Instruction Selection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 3452–3472, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DICS: Exploring Data Intrinsic Consistency for Visual Instruction Selection (Hong et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.163.pdf