Modality-Balancing Preference Optimization of Large Multimodal Models by Adversarial Negative Mining

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Liu, Chenxi, Xiong, Tianyi, Chen, Yanshuo, Chen, Ruibo, Wu, Yihan, Guo, Junfeng, Zhou, Tianyi, Huang, Heng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866914082085404672
author Liu, Chenxi
Xiong, Tianyi
Chen, Yanshuo
Chen, Ruibo
Wu, Yihan
Guo, Junfeng
Zhou, Tianyi
Huang, Heng
author_facet Liu, Chenxi
Xiong, Tianyi
Chen, Yanshuo
Chen, Ruibo
Wu, Yihan
Guo, Junfeng
Zhou, Tianyi
Huang, Heng
contents The task adaptation and alignment of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have been significantly advanced by instruction tuning and further strengthened by recent preference optimization. Yet, most LMMs still suffer from severe modality imbalance during reasoning, i.e., outweighing language prior biases over visual inputs, which bottlenecks their generalization to downstream tasks and causes hallucinations. However, existing preference optimization approaches for LMMs do not focus on restraining the internal biases of their Large Language Model (LLM) backbones when curating the training data. Moreover, they heavily rely on offline data and lack the capacity to explore diverse responses adaptive to dynamic distributional shifts during training. Meanwhile, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a recent method using online-generated data and verified rewards to improve reasoning capabilities, remains largely underexplored in LMM alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel preference learning framework, Modality-Balancing Preference Optimization (MBPO), to address the modality imbalance in LMMs. MBPO constructs a more effective offline preference dataset by generating hard negatives, i.e., rejected responses misled by LLM biases due to limited usage of visual information, through adversarial perturbation of input images. Moreover, MBPO leverages the easy-to-verify nature of close-ended tasks to generate online responses with verified rewards. GRPO is then employed to train the model with offline-online hybrid data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MBPO can enhance LMM performance on challenging vision-language tasks and effectively reduce hallucinations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08022
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modality-Balancing Preference Optimization of Large Multimodal Models by Adversarial Negative Mining
Liu, Chenxi
Xiong, Tianyi
Chen, Yanshuo
Chen, Ruibo
Wu, Yihan
Guo, Junfeng
Zhou, Tianyi
Huang, Heng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The task adaptation and alignment of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have been significantly advanced by instruction tuning and further strengthened by recent preference optimization. Yet, most LMMs still suffer from severe modality imbalance during reasoning, i.e., outweighing language prior biases over visual inputs, which bottlenecks their generalization to downstream tasks and causes hallucinations. However, existing preference optimization approaches for LMMs do not focus on restraining the internal biases of their Large Language Model (LLM) backbones when curating the training data. Moreover, they heavily rely on offline data and lack the capacity to explore diverse responses adaptive to dynamic distributional shifts during training. Meanwhile, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a recent method using online-generated data and verified rewards to improve reasoning capabilities, remains largely underexplored in LMM alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel preference learning framework, Modality-Balancing Preference Optimization (MBPO), to address the modality imbalance in LMMs. MBPO constructs a more effective offline preference dataset by generating hard negatives, i.e., rejected responses misled by LLM biases due to limited usage of visual information, through adversarial perturbation of input images. Moreover, MBPO leverages the easy-to-verify nature of close-ended tasks to generate online responses with verified rewards. GRPO is then employed to train the model with offline-online hybrid data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MBPO can enhance LMM performance on challenging vision-language tasks and effectively reduce hallucinations.
title Modality-Balancing Preference Optimization of Large Multimodal Models by Adversarial Negative Mining
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08022