Open-Qwen2VL: Compute-Efficient Pre-Training of Fully-Open Multimodal
  LLMs on Academic Resources
Authors: name: Weizhi Wang; name: Yu Tian; name: Linjie Yang; name: Heng Wang; name: Xifeng Yan
Published: 2025-04-01 09:54:00

Abstract: The reproduction of state-of-the-art multimodal LLM pre-training faces
barriers at every stage of the pipeline, including high-quality data filtering,
multimodal data mixture strategies, sequence packing techniques, and training
frameworks. We introduce Open-Qwen2VL, a fully open-source 2B-parameter
Multimodal Large Language Model pre-trained efficiently on 29M image-text pairs
using only 442 A100-40G GPU hours. Our approach employs low-to-high dynamic
image resolution and multimodal sequence packing to significantly enhance
pre-training efficiency. The training dataset was carefully curated using both
MLLM-based filtering techniques (e.g., MLM-Filter) and conventional CLIP-based
filtering methods, substantially improving data quality and training
efficiency. The Open-Qwen2VL pre-training is conducted on academic level
8xA100-40G GPUs at UCSB on 5B packed multimodal tokens, which is 0.36\% of 1.4T
multimodal pre-training tokens of Qwen2-VL. The final instruction-tuned
Open-Qwen2VL outperforms partially-open state-of-the-art MLLM Qwen2-VL-2B on
various multimodal benchmarks of MMBench, SEEDBench, MMstar, and MathVista,
indicating the remarkable training efficiency of Open-Qwen2VL. We open-source
all aspects of our work, including compute-efficient and data-efficient
training details, data filtering methods, sequence packing scripts,
pre-training data in WebDataset format, FSDP-based training codebase, and both
base and instruction-tuned model checkpoints. We redefine "fully open" for
multimodal LLMs as the complete release of: 1) the training codebase, 2)
detailed data filtering techniques, and 3) all pre-training and supervised
fine-tuning data used to develop the model.