EAGLE: Exploring the Design Space for Multimodal Large Language Models with a Mixture of Encoders

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The flexibility to precisely interpret advanced visible info is a vital focus of multimodal massive language fashions (MLLMs). Latest work reveals that enhanced visible notion considerably reduces hallucinations and improves efficiency on resolution-sensitive duties, reminiscent of optical character recognition and doc evaluation. A number of current MLLMs obtain this by using a combination of imaginative and prescient encoders. Regardless of their success, there’s a lack of systematic comparisons and detailed ablation research addressing crucial facets, reminiscent of skilled choice and the combination of a number of imaginative and prescient consultants. This text gives an intensive exploration of the design area for MLLMs utilizing a combination of imaginative and prescient encoders and resolutions, the Eagle framework that makes an attempt to discover the design area for multimodal massive language fashions with a combination of encoders. The findings reveal a number of underlying rules frequent to numerous current methods, resulting in a streamlined but efficient design strategy. Eagle discovers that merely concatenating visible tokens from a set of complementary imaginative and prescient encoders is as efficient as extra advanced mixing architectures or methods. Moreover, Eagle introduces Pre-Alignment to bridge the hole between vision-focused encoders and language tokens, enhancing mannequin coherence. The ensuing household of MLLMs, Eagle, surpasses different main open-source fashions on main MLLM benchmarks. 

Eagle’s work is said to the final structure design of multimodal massive language fashions (MLLMs). In addition to the road of consultant open-source analysis talked about earlier, different notable households of MLLMs embody, however are usually not restricted to, MiniGPT-4, Lynx, Otter, QwenVL, CogVLM, VILA, GPT-4V, Gemini, and Llama 3.1. Relying on how imaginative and prescient indicators are built-in into the language mannequin, MLLMs could be broadly categorized into “cross-modal consideration” fashions and “prefix-tuning” fashions. The previous injects visible info into completely different layers of LLMs utilizing cross-modal consideration, whereas the latter treats the visible tokens as a part of the language token sequence and immediately appends them with textual content embeddings. Eagle’s mannequin belongs to the prefix-tuning household by following a LLaVA-styled multimodal structure. Contemplating that MLLM is a fast-growing discipline, Eagle recommends referring to extra detailed research and surveys for additional insights.

Eagle’s work is carefully associated to analysis targeted on enhancing imaginative and prescient encoder designs for MLLMs. Early works often adopted imaginative and prescient encoders pre-trained on vision-language alignment duties reminiscent of CLIP and EVA-CLIP. Stronger imaginative and prescient encoders, reminiscent of SigLIP and InternVL, have been proposed to boost vision-language duties with higher designs, bigger mannequin sizes, and simpler coaching recipes. Since fashions are sometimes pre-trained on low-resolution photos and will lack the flexibility to encode fine-grained particulars, greater decision adaptation is continuously carried out to extend the MLLM enter decision. Along with greater decision adaptation, fashions like LLaVA-NeXT, LLaVA-UHD, Monkey, InternLM-XComposer, and InternVL use tiling or adaptive tiling to deal with high-resolution enter, the place photos are divided into lower-resolution patches and processed individually. Whereas the flexibility to deal with greater decision is made doable by introducing further imaginative and prescient consultants, this strategy differs barely from tiling methods, although each are suitable and could be mixed.

The success of huge language fashions (LLMs) has sparked vital curiosity in enabling their visible notion capabilities, permitting them to see, perceive, and cause in the true world. On the core of those multimodal massive language fashions (MLLMs) is a typical design the place photos are transformed right into a sequence of visible tokens by the imaginative and prescient encoders and appended with the textual content embeddings. CLIP is usually chosen because the imaginative and prescient encoder as a result of its visible illustration is aligned with the textual content area by pre-training on image-text pairs. Relying on the architectures, coaching recipes, and the best way imaginative and prescient tokens are injected into the language mannequin, notable households of MLLMs embody Flamingo, BLIP, PaLI, PaLM-E, and LLaVA. Most of those fashions preserve comparatively low enter resolutions resulting from limitations in pre-trained imaginative and prescient encoders and LLM sequence size. Eagle’s work is carefully aligned with fashions that use a number of imaginative and prescient encoders for improved notion. Mini-Gemini and LLaVA-HR suggest fusing high-resolution visible options into low-resolution visible tokens. Past decision points, these pre-trained imaginative and prescient encoders might lack particular capabilities reminiscent of studying textual content or localizing objects. To handle this, varied fashions combine imaginative and prescient encoders pre-trained on completely different imaginative and prescient duties to boost the imaginative and prescient encoder’s capabilities.

As an illustration, fashions like Mousi and Courageous fuse visible tokens from completely different imaginative and prescient encoders by concatenating alongside the channel or token course. RADIO introduces a multi-teacher distillation methodology to unify the talents of various imaginative and prescient encoders right into a single mannequin. MoAI, IVE, and Prismer additional use the output of imaginative and prescient consultants, reminiscent of OCR, detection, or depth estimation, to complement further info for MLLMs to generate solutions. MoVA devises a routing community to assign an optimum imaginative and prescient mannequin primarily based on the given picture and directions. 

Latest research have proven that stronger imaginative and prescient encoder designs are necessary for decreasing MLLM hallucinations and enhancing efficiency on resolution-sensitive duties like optical character recognition (OCR). A number of works give attention to enhancing the potential of the imaginative and prescient encoder, both by scaling up the pre-training knowledge and parameters or by dividing photos into low-resolution patches. Nevertheless, these approaches typically introduce massive coaching useful resource calls for. An environment friendly but highly effective technique is mixing visible encoders pre-trained with completely different duties and enter resolutions, both by fusing greater decision encoders with the CLIP encoder, sequentially appending options from completely different encoders, or adopting extra advanced fusion and routing methods to maximise the advantages of various encoders. This “mixture-of-vision-experts” strategy has confirmed efficient, although an in depth examine of its design area with rigorous ablation remains to be missing, motivating Eagle to revisit this space. Key questions stay: which imaginative and prescient encoder combos to decide on, the right way to fuse completely different consultants, and the right way to alter coaching methods with extra imaginative and prescient encoders.

To handle these questions, Eagle systematically investigates the mixture-of-vision-encoders design area for improved MLLM notion. The exploration of this design area includes the next steps: 1) Benchmarking varied imaginative and prescient encoders and looking for greater decision adaptation; 2) Conducting an “apples to apples” comparability between imaginative and prescient encoder fusion methods; 3) Progressively figuring out the optimum mixture of a number of imaginative and prescient encoders; 4) Bettering imaginative and prescient skilled pre-alignment and knowledge combination. The exploration steps are illustrated within the following picture. 

Eagle’s examine covers the efficiency of imaginative and prescient encoders pre-trained on completely different duties and resolutions, reminiscent of vision-language alignment, self-supervised studying, detection, segmentation, and OCR. Utilizing a round-robin strategy, Eagle begins with the fundamental CLIP encoder and provides one further skilled at a time, choosing the skilled that gives the perfect enchancment in every spherical.

Whereas Eagle’s work is just not the primary to leverage a number of imaginative and prescient encoders in MLLMs, the systematic examine results in a number of key findings below this setting:

  • Unlocking the imaginative and prescient encoders throughout MLLM coaching issues. That is in distinction to fashions like LLaVA and others that take into account a number of imaginative and prescient encoders or academics, the place freezing the imaginative and prescient encoders has been frequent follow.
  • Some lately proposed fusion methods don’t present vital benefits. As an alternative, easy channel concatenation emerges as a easy but aggressive fusion technique, providing the perfect effectivity and efficiency.
  • Incorporating further imaginative and prescient consultants results in constant good points. This makes it a promising path for systematically enhancing MLLM notion, other than scaling up single encoders. The advance is especially pronounced when imaginative and prescient encoders are unlocked.
  • Pre-alignment stage is vital. Eagle introduces a pre-alignment stage the place non-text-aligned imaginative and prescient consultants are individually fine-tuned with a frozen LLM earlier than being educated collectively. This stage considerably enhances MLLM efficiency below the mixture-of-vision-encoder design.

Eagle: Methodology and Structure

Not like earlier strategies that target new fusion methods or architectures amongst imaginative and prescient encoders, Eagle’s aim is to determine a minimalistic design to fuse completely different imaginative and prescient encoders, supported by detailed ablations and eradicating any pointless elements. As proven within the following determine, Eagle begins by extending the fundamental CLIP encoder to a set of imaginative and prescient consultants with completely different architectures, pre-training duties, and resolutions. With these consultants, Eagle then compares completely different fusion architectures and strategies and explores the right way to optimize pre-training methods with a number of encoders.

Lastly, Eagle combines all of the findings and extends the strategy to a number of skilled imaginative and prescient encoders with various resolutions and area data. Utilizing the identical pre-training knowledge as LLaVA-1.5, which consists of 595k image-text pairs, Eagle strikes to the supervised fine-tuning stage by accumulating knowledge from a sequence of duties and changing them into multimodal conversations, together with LLaVA-1.5, Laion-GPT4V, ShareGPT-4V, DocVQA, synDog-EN, ChartQA, DVQA, and AI2D, leading to 934k samples.

The mannequin is first pre-trained with image-text pairs for one epoch with a batch dimension of 256, the place the complete mannequin is frozen, and solely the projector layer is up to date. Within the second stage, the mannequin is fine-tuned on the supervised fine-tuning knowledge for one epoch with a batch dimension of 128. For this exploration, Eagle employs Vicuna-7B because the underlying language mannequin. The training charges are set to 1e-3 for the primary stage and 2e-5 for the second stage.

Stronger CLIP Encoder

Eagle begins the exploration with the CLIP mannequin, because it has develop into the first alternative for a lot of MLLMs. Whereas CLIP fashions are identified to boost multimodal duties, their limitations have additionally been well-documented. For instance, many current MLLMs have a tendency to make use of the pre-trained CLIP resolutions (reminiscent of 224 × 224 or 336 × 336) as their enter resolutions. In these circumstances, the encoders typically battle to seize fine-grained particulars necessary for resolution-sensitive duties like OCR and doc understanding.

To deal with elevated enter decision, a standard strategy is tiling, the place enter photos are divided into tiles and encoded individually. One other easier methodology is to immediately scale up the enter decision and interpolate the place embeddings of the imaginative and prescient transformer mannequin if vital. Eagle compares these two approaches with frozen and unfrozen imaginative and prescient encoders throughout completely different resolutions, with the outcomes contained within the above desk. The findings could be summarized as follows:

  • Unfreezing the CLIP encoder results in vital enchancment when interpolating to the next MLLM enter decision that differs from the CLIP pre-training decision, with out efficiency degradation when resolutions stay the identical.
  • Freezing the CLIP encoder and immediately adapting it to the next MLLM enter decision considerably harms efficiency.
  • Among the many methods in contrast, immediately interpolating to 448 × 448 with an unfrozen CLIP encoder proves to be each efficient and environment friendly when it comes to efficiency and price.
  • The perfect CLIP encoder achieves efficiency near InternVL, regardless of being a a lot smaller mannequin (300M vs. 6B) with much less pre-training knowledge.

It’s price noting that CLIP-448 permits Eagle to match the setting with LLaVA-HR and InternVL, the place the CLIP encoders are equally tailored to take 448 × 448 enter and output 1024 patch tokens. For additional investigation, Eagle follows this easy technique of scaling up the enter decision and unlocking the imaginative and prescient encoder throughout coaching.

Eagle observes that current in style fusion methods, regardless of their design variations, could be broadly categorized as follows:

  1. Sequence Append: Instantly appending the visible tokens from completely different backbones as an extended sequence.
  2. Channel Concatenation: Concatenating the visible tokens alongside the channel dimension with out growing the sequence size.
  3. LLaVA-HR: Injecting high-resolution options into low-resolution imaginative and prescient encoders utilizing a mixture-of-resolution adapter.
  4. Mini-Gemini: Utilizing the CLIP tokens as low-resolution queries to cross-attend one other high-resolution imaginative and prescient encoder in co-located native home windows.
  5. Deformable Consideration: A brand new baseline launched on high of Mini-Gemini, the place the vanilla window consideration is changed with deformable consideration.

As an alternative of coaching a projector to concurrently align a number of imaginative and prescient consultants as in LLaVA’s unique pre-training technique, we first align the illustration of every particular person skilled with a smaller language mannequin (Vicuna-7B in follow) utilizing next-token-prediction supervision. As proven within the determine beneath, with pre-alignment, the entire coaching course of consists of three steps: 1) coaching every pre-trained imaginative and prescient skilled with their very own projector on SFT knowledge, whereas holding the language mannequin frozen; 2) combining all of the imaginative and prescient consultants from step one and coaching solely the projector with image-text pairs knowledge; 3) coaching the entire mannequin on the SFT knowledge. 

Eagle: Experiments and Outcomes

After meticulously creating its methods, Eagle has established the next rules for the mannequin: (1) integrating extra imaginative and prescient consultants with an optimized coaching recipe; (2) combining a number of imaginative and prescient consultants by means of direct channel concatenation; (3) pre-training the imaginative and prescient consultants individually through pre-alignment. On this part, to additional show the benefits of the Eagle fashions, further coaching knowledge is integrated, and Eagle is in contrast towards the present state-of-the-art MLLMs throughout varied duties. Eagle makes use of Vicuna-v1.5-7B, Llama3-8B, and Vicuna-v1.5-13B because the language fashions. For the imaginative and prescient encoders, primarily based on the leads to Part 2.6, Eagle fashions are denoted as Eagle-X4, which incorporates 4 imaginative and prescient encoders: CLIP, ConvNeXt, Pix2Struct, and EVA-02, and Eagle-X5, which incorporates a further SAM imaginative and prescient encoder.

Visible Query Answering Duties

Eagle compares the mannequin sequence throughout three Visible Query Answering (VQA) benchmarks, together with GQA, VQAv2, and VizWiz. As proven within the following desk, Eagle-X5 achieves state-of-the-art efficiency on GQA and VQAv2, highlighting the benefits of incorporating further imaginative and prescient consultants.

OCR and Chart Understanding Duties

To guage the OCR, doc, and chart understanding capabilities of Eagle, the mannequin is benchmarked on OCRBench, TextVQA, and ChartQA. As proven within the above desk, Eagle considerably surpasses rivals on TextVQA, benefiting from its high-resolution structure and integration of various imaginative and prescient encoders. Notably, Eagle maintains an easy design, supporting as much as 1024 tokens with out requiring advanced tile decomposition of photos.

The determine beneath presents examples of OCR and doc understanding circumstances. With high-resolution adaptation and the inclusion of extra imaginative and prescient consultants, Eagle can determine small textual content inside photos and precisely extract info primarily based on consumer directions. 

To higher perceive the advantages of introducing consultants pre-trained on different imaginative and prescient duties, the next determine visualizes outcomes from a mannequin with solely the ConvNeXt and CLIP imaginative and prescient encoders, in comparison with the outcomes of Eagle-X5. With the complete set of imaginative and prescient encoders, the mannequin efficiently corrects errors, demonstrating that even when outfitted with high-resolution imaginative and prescient encoders pre-trained on vision-language alignment, Eagle’s capabilities are additional enhanced by integrating further imaginative and prescient consultants pre-trained on various imaginative and prescient duties.

Multimodal Benchmark Analysis

Eagle is evaluated on seven benchmarks for MLLMs to show its capabilities from completely different views, together with MME, MMBench, SEED, MathVista, MMMU, ScienceQA, and POPE. Particularly, MME, MMBench, and SEED assess the general efficiency on varied real-world duties involving reasoning, recognition, data, and OCR. MMMU focuses on difficult issues from various domains that require college-level data. POPE evaluates the visible hallucinations of MLLMs. The metrics used on this analysis adhere to the default settings of those benchmarks. Eagle reviews the notion rating for MME, the en_dev cut up for MMBench, the picture cut up of SEED, the test-mini cut up of MathVista, the val cut up of MMMU, the F1-score of POPE, and the picture rating for ScienceQA, making certain alignment with the reported scores from different fashions.

Closing Ideas

On this article, we’ve talked about Eagle, an in-depth evaluation of the design area for integrating imaginative and prescient encoders into multimodal massive language fashions. Not like earlier works that target designing novel fusion paradigms, Eagle finds that systematic design selections matter and discovers a sequence of helpful methods. Step-by-step, Eagle optimizes the coaching recipe of particular person imaginative and prescient encoders, identifies an extendable and environment friendly fusion methodology, and progressively combines imaginative and prescient encoders with completely different area data. The outcomes spotlight the crucial significance of fundamental design area concerns.

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