LLaVA-MORE: A Comparative Study of LLMs and Visual Backbones for Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cocchi, Federico, Moratelli, Nicholas, Caffagni, Davide, Sarto, Sara, Baraldi, Lorenzo, Cornia, Marcella, Cucchiara, Rita
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cocchi, Federico
Moratelli, Nicholas
Caffagni, Davide
Sarto, Sara
Baraldi, Lorenzo
Cornia, Marcella
Cucchiara, Rita
author_facet Cocchi, Federico
Moratelli, Nicholas
Caffagni, Davide
Sarto, Sara
Baraldi, Lorenzo
Cornia, Marcella
Cucchiara, Rita
contents Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has highlighted the critical roles of both the visual backbone and the underlying language model. While prior work has primarily focused on scaling these components to billions of parameters, the trade-offs between model size, architecture, and performance remain underexplored. Additionally, inconsistencies in training data and evaluation protocols have hindered direct comparisons, making it difficult to derive optimal design choices. In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-MORE, a new family of MLLMs that integrates recent language models with diverse visual backbones. To ensure fair comparisons, we employ a unified training protocol applied consistently across all architectures. Our analysis systematically explores both small- and medium-scale LLMs -- including Phi-4, LLaMA-3.1, and Gemma-2 -- to evaluate multimodal reasoning, generation, and instruction following, while examining the relationship between model size and performance. Beyond evaluating the LLM impact on final results, we conduct a comprehensive study of various visual encoders, ranging from CLIP-based architectures to alternatives such as DINOv2, SigLIP, and SigLIP2. Additional experiments investigate the effects of increased image resolution and variations in pre-training datasets. Overall, our results provide insights into the design of more effective MLLMs, offering a reproducible evaluation framework that facilitates direct comparisons and can guide future model development. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/LLaVA-MORE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_15621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLaVA-MORE: A Comparative Study of LLMs and Visual Backbones for Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning
Cocchi, Federico
Moratelli, Nicholas
Caffagni, Davide
Sarto, Sara
Baraldi, Lorenzo
Cornia, Marcella
Cucchiara, Rita
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multimedia
Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has highlighted the critical roles of both the visual backbone and the underlying language model. While prior work has primarily focused on scaling these components to billions of parameters, the trade-offs between model size, architecture, and performance remain underexplored. Additionally, inconsistencies in training data and evaluation protocols have hindered direct comparisons, making it difficult to derive optimal design choices. In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-MORE, a new family of MLLMs that integrates recent language models with diverse visual backbones. To ensure fair comparisons, we employ a unified training protocol applied consistently across all architectures. Our analysis systematically explores both small- and medium-scale LLMs -- including Phi-4, LLaMA-3.1, and Gemma-2 -- to evaluate multimodal reasoning, generation, and instruction following, while examining the relationship between model size and performance. Beyond evaluating the LLM impact on final results, we conduct a comprehensive study of various visual encoders, ranging from CLIP-based architectures to alternatives such as DINOv2, SigLIP, and SigLIP2. Additional experiments investigate the effects of increased image resolution and variations in pre-training datasets. Overall, our results provide insights into the design of more effective MLLMs, offering a reproducible evaluation framework that facilitates direct comparisons and can guide future model development. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/LLaVA-MORE.
title LLaVA-MORE: A Comparative Study of LLMs and Visual Backbones for Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15621