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Main Authors: Zheng, Xinhan, Wu, Huyu, Wang, Xueting, Su, Duo, Jiang, Haiyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26721
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author Zheng, Xinhan
Wu, Huyu
Wang, Xueting
Su, Duo
Jiang, Haiyun
author_facet Zheng, Xinhan
Wu, Huyu
Wang, Xueting
Su, Duo
Jiang, Haiyun
contents Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit a pronounced preference for textual inputs when processing vision-language data, limiting their ability to reason effectively from visual evidence. Unlike prior studies that attribute this text bias to external factors such as data imbalance or instruction tuning, we propose that the bias originates from the model's internal architecture. Specifically, we hypothesize that visual key vectors (Visual Keys) are out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to the text key space learned during language-only pretraining. Consequently, these visual keys receive systematically lower similarity scores during attention computation, leading to their under-utilization in the context representation. To validate this hypothesis, we extract key vectors from LLaVA and Qwen2.5-VL and analyze their distributional structures using qualitative (t-SNE) and quantitative (Jensen-Shannon divergence) methods. The results provide direct evidence that visual and textual keys occupy markedly distinct subspaces within the attention space. The inter-modal divergence is statistically significant, exceeding intra-modal variation by several orders of magnitude. These findings reveal that text bias arises from an intrinsic misalignment within the attention key space rather than solely from external data factors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_26721
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MaLoRA: Gated Modality LoRA for Key-Space Alignment in Multimodal LLM Fine-Tuning
Zheng, Xinhan
Wu, Huyu
Wang, Xueting
Su, Duo
Jiang, Haiyun
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit a pronounced preference for textual inputs when processing vision-language data, limiting their ability to reason effectively from visual evidence. Unlike prior studies that attribute this text bias to external factors such as data imbalance or instruction tuning, we propose that the bias originates from the model's internal architecture. Specifically, we hypothesize that visual key vectors (Visual Keys) are out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to the text key space learned during language-only pretraining. Consequently, these visual keys receive systematically lower similarity scores during attention computation, leading to their under-utilization in the context representation. To validate this hypothesis, we extract key vectors from LLaVA and Qwen2.5-VL and analyze their distributional structures using qualitative (t-SNE) and quantitative (Jensen-Shannon divergence) methods. The results provide direct evidence that visual and textual keys occupy markedly distinct subspaces within the attention space. The inter-modal divergence is statistically significant, exceeding intra-modal variation by several orders of magnitude. These findings reveal that text bias arises from an intrinsic misalignment within the attention key space rather than solely from external data factors.
title MaLoRA: Gated Modality LoRA for Key-Space Alignment in Multimodal LLM Fine-Tuning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26721