ADEM-VL: Adaptive and Embedded Fusion for Efficient Vision-Language
  Tuning
Authors: name: Zhiwei Hao, name: Jianyuan Guo, name: Li Shen, name: Yong Luo, name: Han Hu, name: Yonggang Wen

Recent advancements in multimodal fusion have witnessed the remarkable
success of vision-language (VL) models, which excel in various multimodal
applications such as image captioning and visual question answering. However,
building VL models requires substantial hardware resources, where efficiency is
restricted by two key factors: the extended input sequence of the language
model with vision features demands more computational operations, and a large
number of additional learnable parameters increase memory complexity. These
challenges significantly restrict the broader applicability of such models. To
bridge this gap, we propose ADEM-VL, an efficient vision-language method that
tunes VL models based on pretrained large language models (LLMs) by adopting a
parameter-free cross-attention mechanism for similarity measurements in
multimodal fusion. This approach only requires embedding vision features into
the language space, significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters
and accelerating both training and inference speeds. To enhance representation
learning in fusion module, we introduce an efficient multiscale feature
generation scheme that requires only a single forward pass through the vision
encoder. Moreover, we propose an adaptive fusion scheme that dynamically
discards less relevant visual information for each text token based on its
attention score. This ensures that the fusion process prioritizes the most
pertinent visual features. With experiments on various tasks including visual
question answering, image captioning, and instruction-following, we demonstrate
that our framework outperforms existing approaches. Specifically, our method
surpasses existing methods by an average accuracy of 0.77% on ScienceQA
dataset, with reduced training and inference latency, demonstrating the
superiority of our framework. The code is available at
https://github.com/Hao840/ADEM-VL.