Law of Vision Representation in MLLMs

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission1455 Authors

18 Sept 2024 (modified: 28 Nov 2024)ICLR 2025 Conference SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Multimodality Large Language Models; Computer Vision; Vision Representation
Abstract: We present the "Law of Vision Representation" in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It reveals a strong correlation between the combination of cross-modal alignment, correspondence in vision representation, and MLLM performance. We quantify the two factors using the cross-modal Alignment and Correspondence score (AC score). Through extensive experiments involving thirteen different vision representation settings and evaluations across eight benchmarks, we find that the AC score is linearly correlated to model performance. By leveraging this relationship, we are able to identify and train the optimal vision representation only, which does not require finetuning the language model every time, resulting in a 99.7% reduction in computational cost.
Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
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Submission Number: 1455
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