Cross-modal Information Flow in Multimodal Large Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Zhi, Yadav, Srishti, Han, Fengze, Shutova, Ekaterina
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhang, Zhi
Yadav, Srishti
Han, Fengze
Shutova, Ekaterina
author_facet Zhang, Zhi
Yadav, Srishti
Han, Fengze
Shutova, Ekaterina
contents The recent advancements in auto-regressive multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising progress for vision-language tasks. While there exists a variety of studies investigating the processing of linguistic information within large language models, little is currently known about the inner working mechanism of MLLMs and how linguistic and visual information interact within these models. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by examining the information flow between different modalities -- language and vision -- in MLLMs, focusing on visual question answering. Specifically, given an image-question pair as input, we investigate where in the model and how the visual and linguistic information are combined to generate the final prediction. Conducting experiments with a series of models from the LLaVA series, we find that there are two distinct stages in the process of integration of the two modalities. In the lower layers, the model first transfers the more general visual features of the whole image into the representations of (linguistic) question tokens. In the middle layers, it once again transfers visual information about specific objects relevant to the question to the respective token positions of the question. Finally, in the higher layers, the resulting multimodal representation is propagated to the last position of the input sequence for the final prediction. Overall, our findings provide a new and comprehensive perspective on the spatial and functional aspects of image and language processing in the MLLMs, thereby facilitating future research into multimodal information localization and editing. Our code and collected dataset are released here: https://github.com/FightingFighting/cross-modal-information-flow-in-MLLM.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_18620
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-modal Information Flow in Multimodal Large Language Models
Zhang, Zhi
Yadav, Srishti
Han, Fengze
Shutova, Ekaterina
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The recent advancements in auto-regressive multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising progress for vision-language tasks. While there exists a variety of studies investigating the processing of linguistic information within large language models, little is currently known about the inner working mechanism of MLLMs and how linguistic and visual information interact within these models. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by examining the information flow between different modalities -- language and vision -- in MLLMs, focusing on visual question answering. Specifically, given an image-question pair as input, we investigate where in the model and how the visual and linguistic information are combined to generate the final prediction. Conducting experiments with a series of models from the LLaVA series, we find that there are two distinct stages in the process of integration of the two modalities. In the lower layers, the model first transfers the more general visual features of the whole image into the representations of (linguistic) question tokens. In the middle layers, it once again transfers visual information about specific objects relevant to the question to the respective token positions of the question. Finally, in the higher layers, the resulting multimodal representation is propagated to the last position of the input sequence for the final prediction. Overall, our findings provide a new and comprehensive perspective on the spatial and functional aspects of image and language processing in the MLLMs, thereby facilitating future research into multimodal information localization and editing. Our code and collected dataset are released here: https://github.com/FightingFighting/cross-modal-information-flow-in-MLLM.git.
title Cross-modal Information Flow in Multimodal Large Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18620