MokA: Multimodal Low-Rank Adaptation for MLLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wei, Yake, Miao, Yu, Zhou, Dongzhan, Hu, Di
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917170866290688
author Wei, Yake
Miao, Yu
Zhou, Dongzhan
Hu, Di
author_facet Wei, Yake
Miao, Yu
Zhou, Dongzhan
Hu, Di
contents In this paper, we reveal that most current efficient multimodal fine-tuning methods are hindered by a key limitation: they are directly borrowed from LLMs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences of multimodal scenarios and even affecting the full utilization of all modalities. Inspired by our empirical observation, we argue that unimodal adaptation and cross-modal adaptation are two essential parts for the effective fine-tuning of MLLMs. From this perspective, we propose Multimodal low-rank Adaptation (MokA), a multimodal-aware efficient fine-tuning strategy that takes multimodal characteristics into consideration. It compresses unimodal information by modality-specific parameters while explicitly enhancing cross-modal interaction, ensuring both unimodal and cross-modal adaptation. Extensive experiments cover three representative multimodal scenarios (audio-visual-text, visual-text, and speech-text), and multiple LLM backbones (LLaMA2/3, Qwen2, Qwen2.5-VL, etc). Consistent improvements indicate the efficacy and versatility of the proposed method. Ablation studies and efficiency evaluation are also conducted to fully asses our method. Overall, we think MokA provides a more targeted solution for efficient adaptation of MLLMs, paving the way for further exploration. The project page is at https://gewu-lab.github.io/MokA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05191
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MokA: Multimodal Low-Rank Adaptation for MLLMs
Wei, Yake
Miao, Yu
Zhou, Dongzhan
Hu, Di
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In this paper, we reveal that most current efficient multimodal fine-tuning methods are hindered by a key limitation: they are directly borrowed from LLMs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences of multimodal scenarios and even affecting the full utilization of all modalities. Inspired by our empirical observation, we argue that unimodal adaptation and cross-modal adaptation are two essential parts for the effective fine-tuning of MLLMs. From this perspective, we propose Multimodal low-rank Adaptation (MokA), a multimodal-aware efficient fine-tuning strategy that takes multimodal characteristics into consideration. It compresses unimodal information by modality-specific parameters while explicitly enhancing cross-modal interaction, ensuring both unimodal and cross-modal adaptation. Extensive experiments cover three representative multimodal scenarios (audio-visual-text, visual-text, and speech-text), and multiple LLM backbones (LLaMA2/3, Qwen2, Qwen2.5-VL, etc). Consistent improvements indicate the efficacy and versatility of the proposed method. Ablation studies and efficiency evaluation are also conducted to fully asses our method. Overall, we think MokA provides a more targeted solution for efficient adaptation of MLLMs, paving the way for further exploration. The project page is at https://gewu-lab.github.io/MokA.
title MokA: Multimodal Low-Rank Adaptation for MLLMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05191