The evolution from Large Language Models (LLMs) to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has spurred research into extending In-Context Learning (ICL) to its multimodal counterpart. Existing such studies have primarily concentrated on image-to-text ICL. However, the Text-to-Image ICL (T2I-ICL), with its unique characteristics and potential applications, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we formally define the task of T2I-ICL and present CoBSAT, the first T2I-ICL benchmark dataset, encompassing ten tasks. Utilizing our dataset to benchmark six state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover considerable difficulties MLLMs encounter in solving T2I-ICL. We identify the primary challenges as the inherent complexity of multimodality and image generation, and show that strategies such as fine-tuning and Chain-of-Thought prompting help to mitigate these difficulties, leading to notable improvements in performance. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/UW-Madison-Lee-Lab/CoBSAT.
@article{arxiv.2402.01293,
title = {Can MLLMs Perform Text-to-Image In-Context Learning?},
author = {Yuchen Zeng and Wonjun Kang and Yicong Chen and Hyung Il Koo and Kangwook Lee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.01293},
year = {2024}
}