Multimodal Mamba: Decoder-only Multimodal State Space Model via Quadratic to Linear Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liao, Bencheng, Tao, Hongyuan, Zhang, Qian, Cheng, Tianheng, Li, Yingyue, Yin, Haoran, Liu, Wenyu, Wang, Xinggang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liao, Bencheng
Tao, Hongyuan
Zhang, Qian
Cheng, Tianheng
Li, Yingyue
Yin, Haoran
Liu, Wenyu
Wang, Xinggang
author_facet Liao, Bencheng
Tao, Hongyuan
Zhang, Qian
Cheng, Tianheng
Li, Yingyue
Yin, Haoran
Liu, Wenyu
Wang, Xinggang
contents Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance but face deployment challenges due to their quadratic computational complexity, growing Key-Value cache requirements, and reliance on separate vision encoders. We propose mmMamba, a framework for developing linear-complexity native multimodal state space models through progressive distillation from existing MLLMs using moderate academic computational resources. Our approach enables the direct conversion of trained decoder-only MLLMs to linear-complexity architectures without requiring pre-trained RNN-based LLM or vision encoders. We propose an seeding strategy to carve Mamba from trained Transformer and a three-stage distillation recipe, which can effectively transfer the knowledge from Transformer to Mamba while preserving multimodal capabilities. Our method also supports flexible hybrid architectures that combine Transformer and Mamba layers for customizable efficiency-performance trade-offs. Distilled from the Transformer-based decoder-only HoVLE, mmMamba-linear achieves competitive performance against existing linear and quadratic-complexity VLMs, while mmMamba-hybrid further improves performance significantly, approaching HoVLE's capabilities. At 103K tokens, mmMamba-linear demonstrates 20.6$\times$ speedup and 75.8% GPU memory reduction compared to HoVLE, while mmMamba-hybrid achieves 13.5$\times$ speedup and 60.2% memory savings. Code and models are released at https://github.com/hustvl/mmMamba
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13145
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Mamba: Decoder-only Multimodal State Space Model via Quadratic to Linear Distillation
Liao, Bencheng
Tao, Hongyuan
Zhang, Qian
Cheng, Tianheng
Li, Yingyue
Yin, Haoran
Liu, Wenyu
Wang, Xinggang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance but face deployment challenges due to their quadratic computational complexity, growing Key-Value cache requirements, and reliance on separate vision encoders. We propose mmMamba, a framework for developing linear-complexity native multimodal state space models through progressive distillation from existing MLLMs using moderate academic computational resources. Our approach enables the direct conversion of trained decoder-only MLLMs to linear-complexity architectures without requiring pre-trained RNN-based LLM or vision encoders. We propose an seeding strategy to carve Mamba from trained Transformer and a three-stage distillation recipe, which can effectively transfer the knowledge from Transformer to Mamba while preserving multimodal capabilities. Our method also supports flexible hybrid architectures that combine Transformer and Mamba layers for customizable efficiency-performance trade-offs. Distilled from the Transformer-based decoder-only HoVLE, mmMamba-linear achieves competitive performance against existing linear and quadratic-complexity VLMs, while mmMamba-hybrid further improves performance significantly, approaching HoVLE's capabilities. At 103K tokens, mmMamba-linear demonstrates 20.6$\times$ speedup and 75.8% GPU memory reduction compared to HoVLE, while mmMamba-hybrid achieves 13.5$\times$ speedup and 60.2% memory savings. Code and models are released at https://github.com/hustvl/mmMamba
title Multimodal Mamba: Decoder-only Multimodal State Space Model via Quadratic to Linear Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13145