Abstract
Existing vision-language models (VLMs) mostly rely on vision encoders to extract visual features followed by large language models (LLMs) for visual-language tasks. However, the vision encoders set a strong inductive bias in abstracting visual representation, e.g., resolution, aspect ratio, and semantic priors, which could impede the flexibility and efficiency of the VLMs. Training pure VLMs that accept the seamless vision and language inputs, i.e., without vision encoders, remains challenging and rarely explored. Empirical observations reveal that direct training without encoders results in slow convergence and large performance gaps. In this work, we bridge the gap between encoder-based and encoder-free models, and present a simple yet effective training recipe towards pure VLMs. Specifically, we unveil the key aspects of training encoder-free VLMs efficiently via thorough experiments: (1) Bridging vision-language representation inside one unified decoder; (2) Enhancing visual recognition capability via extra supervision. With these strategies, we launch EVE, an encoder-free vision-language model that can be trained and forwarded efficiently. Notably, solely utilizing 35M publicly accessible data, EVE can impressively rival the encoder-based VLMs of similar capacities across multiple vision-language benchmarks. It significantly outperforms the counterpart Fuyu-8B with mysterious training procedures and undisclosed training data. We believe that EVE provides a transparent and efficient route for developing a pure decoder-only architecture across modalities. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/baaivision/EVE.
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Highlights: (arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11832)
π₯ Superior Capability: An originated encoder-free LVLM with arbitrary image aspect ratio, outperforming the counterpart Fuyu-8B and approaching existing modular encoder-based LVLMs;
π₯ Data Efficiency: Filter solely 33M publicly avaliable data from OpenImages, SAM, LAION for pre-training; Utilizing 665K LLaVA SFT data for EVE-7B, and extra 1.2M SFT data for EVE-7B (HD);
π₯ Training Efficiency: Trained with two 8-A100 (40G) nodes in ~9 days or four 8-A100 nodes in ~5 days;
π₯ Pioneering Route: We attempt to provide an efficient, transparent, and practical training strategy and procedure for developing a pure decoder-only architecture across modalities.
Another cool work from BAAI π₯ Thanks for sharing highlights!
why do you use vicuna, it is so old...
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