Rethinking the Mixture of Vision Encoders Paradigm for Enhanced Visual Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

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Hauptverfasser: Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr, Riddell, James, Sedwards, Sean, Czarnecki, Krzysztof
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr
Riddell, James
Sedwards, Sean
Czarnecki, Krzysztof
author_facet Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr
Riddell, James
Sedwards, Sean
Czarnecki, Krzysztof
contents Mixture of Vision Encoders (MoVE) has emerged as a powerful approach to enhance the fine-grained visual understanding of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), improving their ability to handle tasks such as complex optical character recognition and scene understanding. Despite these advances, effectively combining diverse encoders and their visual tokens, while also scaling to high-resolution inputs, remains an open challenge. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of fusion designs for MoVE-based MLLMs, highlighting principles for token-level integration across complementary encoders. Our study shows that a lightweight recipe consisting of post-adaptation fusion with independent projectors, tile-level sequence interleaving, and dynamic tiling with global context delivers strong performance on diverse benchmarks. We integrate these principles into a simple and effective architecture that we call LEO. Extensive evaluation on 11 vision-language benchmarks demonstrates that LEO achieves better results on the majority of tasks compared to existing MoVE-based approaches. Furthermore, LEO adapts effectively to the specialized domain of autonomous driving without altering its architecture or training recipe, achieving competitive performance against established baselines and thereby highlighting its ability to generalize. The code is available at https://github.com/Mozhgan91/LEO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_06986
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking the Mixture of Vision Encoders Paradigm for Enhanced Visual Understanding in Multimodal LLMs
Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr
Riddell, James
Sedwards, Sean
Czarnecki, Krzysztof
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Mixture of Vision Encoders (MoVE) has emerged as a powerful approach to enhance the fine-grained visual understanding of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), improving their ability to handle tasks such as complex optical character recognition and scene understanding. Despite these advances, effectively combining diverse encoders and their visual tokens, while also scaling to high-resolution inputs, remains an open challenge. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of fusion designs for MoVE-based MLLMs, highlighting principles for token-level integration across complementary encoders. Our study shows that a lightweight recipe consisting of post-adaptation fusion with independent projectors, tile-level sequence interleaving, and dynamic tiling with global context delivers strong performance on diverse benchmarks. We integrate these principles into a simple and effective architecture that we call LEO. Extensive evaluation on 11 vision-language benchmarks demonstrates that LEO achieves better results on the majority of tasks compared to existing MoVE-based approaches. Furthermore, LEO adapts effectively to the specialized domain of autonomous driving without altering its architecture or training recipe, achieving competitive performance against established baselines and thereby highlighting its ability to generalize. The code is available at https://github.com/Mozhgan91/LEO.
title Rethinking the Mixture of Vision Encoders Paradigm for Enhanced Visual Understanding in Multimodal LLMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06986