Eagle: Exploring The Design Space for Multimodal LLMs with Mixture of
  Encoders
Authors: name: Min Shi; name: Fuxiao Liu; name: Shihao Wang; name: Shijia Liao; name: Subhashree Radhakrishnan; name: De-An Huang; name: Hongxu Yin; name: Karan Sapra; name: Yaser Yacoob; name: Humphrey Shi; name: Bryan Catanzaro; name: Andrew Tao; name: Jan Kautz; name: Zhiding Yu; name: Guilin Liu
Published: 2024-08-28 17:59:31

Abstract: The ability to accurately interpret complex visual information is a crucial
topic of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Recent work indicates that
enhanced visual perception significantly reduces hallucinations and improves
performance on resolution-sensitive tasks, such as optical character
recognition and document analysis. A number of recent MLLMs achieve this goal
using a mixture of vision encoders. Despite their success, there is a lack of
systematic comparisons and detailed ablation studies addressing critical
aspects, such as expert selection and the integration of multiple vision
experts. This study provides an extensive exploration of the design space for
MLLMs using a mixture of vision encoders and resolutions. Our findings reveal
several underlying principles common to various existing strategies, leading to
a streamlined yet effective design approach. We discover that simply
concatenating visual tokens from a set of complementary vision encoders is as
effective as more complex mixing architectures or strategies. We additionally
introduce Pre-Alignment to bridge the gap between vision-focused encoders and
language tokens, enhancing model coherence. The resulting family of MLLMs,
Eagle, surpasses other leading open-source models on major MLLM benchmarks.
Models and code: https://github.com/NVlabs/Eagle