Recent advancements in large language models have influenced the development of video large multimodal models (VLMMs). Previous approaches for VLMMs involve Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with instruction-tuned datasets, integrating LLM with visual encoders, and additional learnable parameters. Here, aligning video with text, and vice versa, remains a challenge, primarily due to the insufficient quality and quantity of multimodal instruction-tune data compared to that of text-only. This discrepancy often results in alignments that poorly ground the video content. To address this, we present a novel alignment strategy that employs a multimodal AI system equipped with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF), providing self-preference feedback to refine itself and facilitating the alignment of video and text modalities. Our approach uniquely integrates detailed video descriptions as context into a multimodal AI system during the preference feedback generation to enrich the understanding of video content, a process we call context-aware reward modeling. Empirical evaluations on various video benchmarks demonstrate that our VLM-RLAIF outperforms existing approaches, including the SFT model. We commit to open-sourcing our code, models, and datasets to foster further research in this area.

Communicating with humans is challenging for AIs because it requires a shared understanding of the world, complex semantics (e.g., metaphors or analogies), and at times multi-modal gestures (e.g., pointing with a finger, or an arrow in a diagram). We investigate these challenges in the context of Iconary, a collaborative game of drawing and guessing based on Pictionary, that poses a novel challenge for the research community. In Iconary, a Guesser tries to identify a phrase that a Drawer is drawing by composing icons, and the Drawer iteratively revises the drawing to help the Guesser in response. This back-and-forth often uses canonical scenes, visual metaphor, or icon compositions to express challenging words, making it an ideal test for mixing language and visual/symbolic communication in AI. We propose models to play Iconary and train them on over 55,000 games between human players. Our models are skillful players and are able to employ world knowledge in language models to play with words unseen during training.