Activating Distributed Visual Region within LLMs for Efficient and Effective Vision-Language Training and Inference
This provides an efficient training and inference strategy for vision-language models, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with selective tuning.
The study tackled the problem of inefficient training in large vision-language models by identifying and selectively updating a 'visual region' within LLMs, achieving nearly 99% visual performance preservation with 25% layer updates and reducing training time.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically learn visual capacity through visual instruction tuning, involving updates to both a projector and their LLM backbones. Inspired by the concept of a visual region in the human brain, we investigate the existence of an analogous \textit{visual region} within LLMs that functions as a cognitive core, and explore the potential of efficient training of LVLMs via selective layers tuning. Using Bunny-Llama-3-8B-V for detailed analysis and other three LVLMs for validation across diverse visual and textual tasks, we find that selectively updating 25\% of LLMs layers, when sparsely and uniformly distributed, can preserve nearly 99\% of visual performance and maintain or improve textual task results, while effectively reducing training time. Based on this targeted training approach, we further propose a novel visual region-based pruning paradigm, removing non-critical layers outside the visual region, which can achieve minimal performance loss. This study offers an effective and efficient strategy for LVLM training and inference by activating a layer-wise visual region within LLMs, which proves consistently effective across different models.