HAWAII: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Yimu, Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr, Sedwards, Sean, Czarnecki, Krzysztof
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Wang, Yimu
Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr
Sedwards, Sean
Czarnecki, Krzysztof
author_facet Wang, Yimu
Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr
Sedwards, Sean
Czarnecki, Krzysztof
contents Improving the visual understanding ability of vision-language models (VLMs) is crucial for enhancing their performance across various tasks. While using multiple pretrained visual experts has shown great promise, it often incurs significant computational costs during training and inference. To address this challenge, we propose HAWAII, a novel framework that distills knowledge from multiple visual experts into a single vision encoder, enabling it to inherit the complementary strengths of several experts with minimal computational overhead. To mitigate conflicts among different teachers and switch between different teacher-specific knowledge, instead of using a fixed set of adapters for multiple teachers, we propose to use teacher-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters with a corresponding router. Each adapter is aligned with a specific teacher, avoiding noisy guidance during distillation. To enable efficient knowledge distillation, we propose fine-grained and coarse-grained distillation. At the fine-grained level, token importance scores are employed to emphasize the most informative tokens from each teacher adaptively. At the coarse-grained level, we summarize the knowledge from multiple teachers and transfer it to the student using a set of general-knowledge LoRA adapters with a router. Extensive experiments on various vision-language tasks demonstrate the superiority of HAWAII compared to popular open-source VLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/yimuwangcs/wise-hawaii.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19072
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HAWAII: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Models
Wang, Yimu
Azadani, Mozhgan Nasr
Sedwards, Sean
Czarnecki, Krzysztof
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Improving the visual understanding ability of vision-language models (VLMs) is crucial for enhancing their performance across various tasks. While using multiple pretrained visual experts has shown great promise, it often incurs significant computational costs during training and inference. To address this challenge, we propose HAWAII, a novel framework that distills knowledge from multiple visual experts into a single vision encoder, enabling it to inherit the complementary strengths of several experts with minimal computational overhead. To mitigate conflicts among different teachers and switch between different teacher-specific knowledge, instead of using a fixed set of adapters for multiple teachers, we propose to use teacher-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters with a corresponding router. Each adapter is aligned with a specific teacher, avoiding noisy guidance during distillation. To enable efficient knowledge distillation, we propose fine-grained and coarse-grained distillation. At the fine-grained level, token importance scores are employed to emphasize the most informative tokens from each teacher adaptively. At the coarse-grained level, we summarize the knowledge from multiple teachers and transfer it to the student using a set of general-knowledge LoRA adapters with a router. Extensive experiments on various vision-language tasks demonstrate the superiority of HAWAII compared to popular open-source VLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/yimuwangcs/wise-hawaii.
title HAWAII: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19072