Elevating Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs with Visual Embedding Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jain, Jitesh, Yang, Zhengyuan, Shi, Humphrey, Gao, Jianfeng, Yang, Jianwei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Jain, Jitesh
Yang, Zhengyuan
Shi, Humphrey
Gao, Jianfeng
Yang, Jianwei
author_facet Jain, Jitesh
Yang, Zhengyuan
Shi, Humphrey
Gao, Jianfeng
Yang, Jianwei
contents In recent times, the standard practice for developing MLLMs is to feed features from vision encoder(s) into the LLM and train with natural language supervision. This approach often causes models to lean towards language comprehension and undermine the rich visual perception signals present in the data, which are critical for tasks involving spatial reasoning in the domain of embodied AI and robotics. Is it possible to optimize both at the same time? In this work, we propose VisPer-LM, the first approach that infuses visual perception knowledge from expert vision encoders into the LLM's (of an MLLM) hidden representations. We start by investigating MLLMs trained solely with natural language supervision and identify a positive correlation between the quality of visual representations within these models and their downstream performance. Given this insight, we formulate the objective during the pretraining stage in MLLMs as a coupled optimization of predictive visual embedding and next (text) token prediction. Moreover, through extensive probing, we observe improved visual representation quality due to embedding optimization, underscoring the effectiveness of our probing setup. We demonstrate that our VisPer-LM outperforms the single and multi-encoder baselines, proving our approach's superiority over explicitly feeding the corresponding features to the LLM. In particular, VisPer-LM boosts performance by an average margin of up to 2.5% on various benchmarks, with a notable improvement of 8.7% on the Depth task in CV-Bench.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_09585
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Elevating Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs with Visual Embedding Distillation
Jain, Jitesh
Yang, Zhengyuan
Shi, Humphrey
Gao, Jianfeng
Yang, Jianwei
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In recent times, the standard practice for developing MLLMs is to feed features from vision encoder(s) into the LLM and train with natural language supervision. This approach often causes models to lean towards language comprehension and undermine the rich visual perception signals present in the data, which are critical for tasks involving spatial reasoning in the domain of embodied AI and robotics. Is it possible to optimize both at the same time? In this work, we propose VisPer-LM, the first approach that infuses visual perception knowledge from expert vision encoders into the LLM's (of an MLLM) hidden representations. We start by investigating MLLMs trained solely with natural language supervision and identify a positive correlation between the quality of visual representations within these models and their downstream performance. Given this insight, we formulate the objective during the pretraining stage in MLLMs as a coupled optimization of predictive visual embedding and next (text) token prediction. Moreover, through extensive probing, we observe improved visual representation quality due to embedding optimization, underscoring the effectiveness of our probing setup. We demonstrate that our VisPer-LM outperforms the single and multi-encoder baselines, proving our approach's superiority over explicitly feeding the corresponding features to the LLM. In particular, VisPer-LM boosts performance by an average margin of up to 2.5% on various benchmarks, with a notable improvement of 8.7% on the Depth task in CV-Bench.
title Elevating Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs with Visual Embedding Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09585