LLaVA-Phi: Efficient Multi-Modal Assistant with Small Language Model
This work addresses the problem of resource-efficient multi-modal interaction for applications in time-sensitive environments like embodied agents, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a smaller model.
The paper tackles the challenge of enabling efficient multi-modal dialogues by introducing LLaVA-Phi, which uses a small language model (Phi-2 with 2.7B parameters) to achieve commendable performance on visual comprehension, reasoning, and knowledge-based perception benchmarks.
In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-$φ$ (LLaVA-Phi), an efficient multi-modal assistant that harnesses the power of the recently advanced small language model, Phi-2, to facilitate multi-modal dialogues. LLaVA-Phi marks a notable advancement in the realm of compact multi-modal models. It demonstrates that even smaller language models, with as few as 2.7B parameters, can effectively engage in intricate dialogues that integrate both textual and visual elements, provided they are trained with high-quality corpora. Our model delivers commendable performance on publicly available benchmarks that encompass visual comprehension, reasoning, and knowledge-based perception. Beyond its remarkable performance in multi-modal dialogue tasks, our model opens new avenues for applications in time-sensitive environments and systems that require real-time interaction, such as embodied agents. It highlights the potential of smaller language models to achieve sophisticated levels of understanding and interaction, while maintaining greater resource efficiency.The project is available at {https://github.com/zhuyiche/llava-phi}.