Decoupled Proxy Alignment: Mitigating Language Prior Conflict for Multimodal Alignment in MLLM
This addresses a previously overlooked issue in MLLM training that affects vision-language alignment, offering a robust method with exceptional generalization capabilities, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing MLLM advancements.
The paper tackles the problem of language prior conflict in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), where mismatches between language priors in LLMs and training datasets cause suboptimal vision-language alignment, and proposes Decoupled Proxy Alignment (DPA) to mitigate this, achieving superior alignment performance across diverse datasets, model families, and scales.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention due to their impressive ability to integrate vision and language modalities. Recent advancements in MLLMs have primarily focused on improving performance through high-quality datasets, novel architectures, and optimized training strategies. However, in this paper, we identify a previously overlooked issue, language prior conflict, a mismatch between the inherent language priors of large language models (LLMs) and the language priors in training datasets. This conflict leads to suboptimal vision-language alignment, as MLLMs are prone to adapting to the language style of training samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel training method called Decoupled Proxy Alignment (DPA). DPA introduces two key innovations: (1) the use of a proxy LLM during pretraining to decouple the vision-language alignment process from language prior interference, and (2) dynamic loss adjustment based on visual relevance to strengthen optimization signals for visually relevant tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPA significantly mitigates the language prior conflict, achieving superior alignment performance across diverse datasets, model families, and scales. Our method not only improves the effectiveness of MLLM training but also shows exceptional generalization capabilities, making it a robust approach for vision-language alignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/fnlp-vision/DPA.