Fusion to Enhance: Fusion Visual Encoder to Enhance Multimodal Language Model

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: She, Yifei, Wu, Huangxuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908511764480000
author She, Yifei
Wu, Huangxuan
author_facet She, Yifei
Wu, Huangxuan
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in bridging visual perception with high-level textual reasoning. However, they face a fundamental contradiction: while excelling at complex semantic understanding, these models often fail at basic visual tasks that require precise detail perception. This deficiency primarily stems from the prevalent architectural reliance on a single vision encoder optimized for high-level semantic alignment, which inherently sacrifices the ability to capture fine-grained visual information. To address this issue, we introduce Fusion to Enhance (FtZ), a novel vision tower framework. FtZ moves beyond the single-encoder design by innovatively composing a semantically powerful anchor encoder with a perception-rich augmenting encoder via a lightweight Multi-Head Cross-Attention mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that on several challenging benchmarks demanding fine-grained visual understanding, such as TextVQA, POPE, MMMU, MME and MM-Vet, our FtZ model significantly outperforms baselines that use only a single encoder or existing feature fusion methods. This work proves that composing heterogeneous expert encoders is an efficient and effective path to overcoming the visual perception bottleneck in current MLLMs, offering a new design paradigm for building next-generation AI systems with stronger perceptual capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00664
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fusion to Enhance: Fusion Visual Encoder to Enhance Multimodal Language Model
She, Yifei
Wu, Huangxuan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in bridging visual perception with high-level textual reasoning. However, they face a fundamental contradiction: while excelling at complex semantic understanding, these models often fail at basic visual tasks that require precise detail perception. This deficiency primarily stems from the prevalent architectural reliance on a single vision encoder optimized for high-level semantic alignment, which inherently sacrifices the ability to capture fine-grained visual information. To address this issue, we introduce Fusion to Enhance (FtZ), a novel vision tower framework. FtZ moves beyond the single-encoder design by innovatively composing a semantically powerful anchor encoder with a perception-rich augmenting encoder via a lightweight Multi-Head Cross-Attention mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that on several challenging benchmarks demanding fine-grained visual understanding, such as TextVQA, POPE, MMMU, MME and MM-Vet, our FtZ model significantly outperforms baselines that use only a single encoder or existing feature fusion methods. This work proves that composing heterogeneous expert encoders is an efficient and effective path to overcoming the visual perception bottleneck in current MLLMs, offering a new design paradigm for building next-generation AI systems with stronger perceptual capabilities.
title Fusion to Enhance: Fusion Visual Encoder to Enhance Multimodal Language Model
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00664