Instruction following is crucial in contemporary LLM. However, when extended to multimodal setting, it often suffers from misalignment between specific textual instruction and targeted local region of an image. To achieve more accurate and nuanced multimodal instruction following, we introduce Instruction-guided Visual Masking (IVM), a new versatile visual grounding model that is compatible with diverse multimodal models, such as LMM and robot model. By constructing visual masks for instruction-irrelevant regions, IVM-enhanced multimodal models can effectively focus on task-relevant image regions to better align with complex instructions. Specifically, we design a visual masking data generation pipeline and create an IVM-Mix-1M dataset with 1 million image-instruction pairs. We further introduce a new learning technique, Discriminator Weighted Supervised Learning (DWSL) for preferential IVM training that prioritizes high-quality data samples. Experimental results on generic multimodal tasks such as VQA and embodied robotic control demonstrate the versatility of IVM, which as a plug-and-play tool, significantly boosts the performance of diverse multimodal models, yielding new state-of-the-art results across challenging multimodal benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/2toinf/IVM.

Traffic accidents have been a severe issue in metropolises with the development of traffic flow. This paper explores the theory and application of a recently developed machine learning technique, namely Import Vector Machines (IVMs), in real-time crash risk analysis, which is a hot topic to reduce traffic accidents. Historical crash data and corresponding traffic data from Shanghai Urban Expressway System were employed and matched. Traffic conditions are labelled as dangerous (i.e. probably leading to a crash) and safe (i.e. a normal traffic condition) based on 5-minute measurements of average speed, volume and occupancy. The IVM algorithm is trained to build the classifier and its performance is compared to the popular and successfully applied technique of Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The main findings indicate that IVMs could successfully be employed in real-time identification of dangerous pro-active traffic conditions. Furthermore, similar to the "support points" of the SVM, the IVM model uses only a fraction of the training data to index kernel basis functions, typically a much smaller fraction than the SVM, and its classification rates are similar to those of SVMs. This gives the IVM a computational advantage over the SVM, especially when the size of the training data set is large.