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Main Authors: Yu, Zeping, Ananiadou, Sophia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10950
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author Yu, Zeping
Ananiadou, Sophia
author_facet Yu, Zeping
Ananiadou, Sophia
contents Understanding the mechanisms behind Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for designing improved models and strategies. While recent studies have yielded valuable insights into the mechanisms of textual LLMs, the mechanisms of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain underexplored. In this paper, we apply mechanistic interpretability methods to analyze the visual question answering (VQA) mechanisms in the first MLLM, Llava. We compare the mechanisms between VQA and textual QA (TQA) in color answering tasks and find that: a) VQA exhibits a mechanism similar to the in-context learning mechanism observed in TQA; b) the visual features exhibit significant interpretability when projecting the visual embeddings into the embedding space; and c) Llava enhances the existing capabilities of the corresponding textual LLM Vicuna during visual instruction tuning. Based on these findings, we develop an interpretability tool to help users and researchers identify important visual locations for final predictions, aiding in the understanding of visual hallucination. Our method demonstrates faster and more effective results compared to existing interpretability approaches. Code: \url{https://github.com/zepingyu0512/llava-mechanism}
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_10950
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Multimodal LLMs: the Mechanistic Interpretability of Llava in Visual Question Answering
Yu, Zeping
Ananiadou, Sophia
Computation and Language
Understanding the mechanisms behind Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for designing improved models and strategies. While recent studies have yielded valuable insights into the mechanisms of textual LLMs, the mechanisms of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain underexplored. In this paper, we apply mechanistic interpretability methods to analyze the visual question answering (VQA) mechanisms in the first MLLM, Llava. We compare the mechanisms between VQA and textual QA (TQA) in color answering tasks and find that: a) VQA exhibits a mechanism similar to the in-context learning mechanism observed in TQA; b) the visual features exhibit significant interpretability when projecting the visual embeddings into the embedding space; and c) Llava enhances the existing capabilities of the corresponding textual LLM Vicuna during visual instruction tuning. Based on these findings, we develop an interpretability tool to help users and researchers identify important visual locations for final predictions, aiding in the understanding of visual hallucination. Our method demonstrates faster and more effective results compared to existing interpretability approaches. Code: \url{https://github.com/zepingyu0512/llava-mechanism}
title Understanding Multimodal LLMs: the Mechanistic Interpretability of Llava in Visual Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10950