Title: SMAR: Soft Modality-Aware Routing Strategy for MoE-based Multimodal Large Language Models Preserving Language Capabilities
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: Mixture of Experts (MoE), Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have become a key approach for scaling large language models, with growing interest in extending them to multimodal tasks. Existing methods to build multimodal MoE models either incur high training costs or suffer from degraded language capabilities when adapting pretrained models. To address this, we propose Soft Modality-Aware Routing (SMAR), a novel regularization technique that uses Kullback–Leibler divergence to control routing probability distributions across modalities, encouraging expert specialization without modifying model architecture or heavily relying on textual data. Experiments on visual instruction tuning show that SMAR preserves language ability at 86.6% retention with only 2.5% pure text, outperforming baselines while maintaining strong multimodal performance. Our approach offers a practical and efficient solution to balance modality differentiation and language capabilities in multimodal MoE models.