MoVE-KD: Knowledge Distillation for VLMs with Mixture of Visual Encoders

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Cao, Jiajun, Zhang, Yuan, Huang, Tao, Lu, Ming, Zhang, Qizhe, An, Ruichuan, MA, Ningning, Zhang, Shanghang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866912279164878848
author Cao, Jiajun
Zhang, Yuan
Huang, Tao
Lu, Ming
Zhang, Qizhe
An, Ruichuan
MA, Ningning
Zhang, Shanghang
author_facet Cao, Jiajun
Zhang, Yuan
Huang, Tao
Lu, Ming
Zhang, Qizhe
An, Ruichuan
MA, Ningning
Zhang, Shanghang
contents Visual encoders are fundamental components in vision-language models (VLMs), each showcasing unique strengths derived from various pre-trained visual foundation models. To leverage the various capabilities of these encoders, recent studies incorporate multiple encoders within a single VLM, leading to a considerable increase in computational cost. In this paper, we present Mixture-of-Visual-Encoder Knowledge Distillation (MoVE-KD), a novel framework that distills the unique proficiencies of multiple vision encoders into a single, efficient encoder model. Specifically, to mitigate conflicts and retain the unique characteristics of each teacher encoder, we employ low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and mixture-of-experts (MoEs) to selectively activate specialized knowledge based on input features, enhancing both adaptability and efficiency. To regularize the KD process and enhance performance, we propose an attention-based distillation strategy that adaptively weighs the different encoders and emphasizes valuable visual tokens, reducing the burden of replicating comprehensive but distinct features from multiple teachers. Comprehensive experiments on popular VLMs, such as LLaVA and LLaVA-NeXT, validate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hey-cjj/MoVE-KD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01709
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MoVE-KD: Knowledge Distillation for VLMs with Mixture of Visual Encoders
Cao, Jiajun
Zhang, Yuan
Huang, Tao
Lu, Ming
Zhang, Qizhe
An, Ruichuan
MA, Ningning
Zhang, Shanghang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Visual encoders are fundamental components in vision-language models (VLMs), each showcasing unique strengths derived from various pre-trained visual foundation models. To leverage the various capabilities of these encoders, recent studies incorporate multiple encoders within a single VLM, leading to a considerable increase in computational cost. In this paper, we present Mixture-of-Visual-Encoder Knowledge Distillation (MoVE-KD), a novel framework that distills the unique proficiencies of multiple vision encoders into a single, efficient encoder model. Specifically, to mitigate conflicts and retain the unique characteristics of each teacher encoder, we employ low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and mixture-of-experts (MoEs) to selectively activate specialized knowledge based on input features, enhancing both adaptability and efficiency. To regularize the KD process and enhance performance, we propose an attention-based distillation strategy that adaptively weighs the different encoders and emphasizes valuable visual tokens, reducing the burden of replicating comprehensive but distinct features from multiple teachers. Comprehensive experiments on popular VLMs, such as LLaVA and LLaVA-NeXT, validate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hey-cjj/MoVE-KD.
title MoVE-KD: Knowledge Distillation for VLMs with Mixture of Visual Encoders
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01709