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Jitesh Jain

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Elevating Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs with Visual Embedding Distillation

Jitesh Jain
Zhengyuan Yang
Humphrey Shi
Jianfeng Gao
Jianwei Yang

In recent times, the standard practice for developing MLLMs is to feed features from vision encoder(s) into the LLM and train with natural language supervision. This approach often causes models to lean towards language comprehension and undermine the rich visual perception signals present in the data, which are critical for tasks involving spatial reasoning in the domain of embodied AI and robotics. Is it possible to optimize both at the same time? In this work, we propose VisPer-LM, the first approach that infuses visual perception knowledge from expert vision encoders into the LLM's (of an MLLM) hidden representations. We start by investigating MLLMs trained solely with natural language supervision and identify a positive correlation between the quality of visual representations within these models and their downstream performance. Given this insight, we formulate the objective during the pretraining stage in MLLMs as a coupled optimization of predictive visual embedding and next (text) token prediction. Moreover, through extensive probing, we observe improved visual representation quality due to embedding optimization, underscoring the effectiveness of our probing setup. We demonstrate that our VisPer-LM outperforms the single and multi-encoder baselines, proving our approach's superiority over explicitly feeding the corresponding features to the LLM. In particular, VisPer-LM boosts performance by an average margin of up to 2. 5% on various benchmarks, with a notable improvement of 8. 7% on the Depth task in CV-Bench.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

CuMo: Scaling Multimodal LLM with Co-Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts

Jiachen Li
Xinyao Wang
Sijie Zhu
Chia-Wen Kuo
Lu Xu
Fan Chen
Jitesh Jain
Humphrey Shi

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) have focused primarily on scaling by increasing text-image pair data and enhancing LLMs to improve performance on multimodal tasks. However, these scaling approaches are computationally expensive and overlook the significance of efficiently improving model capabilities from the vision side. Inspired by the successful applications of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in LLMs, which improves model scalability during training while keeping inference costs similar to those of smaller models, we propose CuMo, which incorporates Co-upcycled Top-K sparsely-gated Mixture-of-experts blocks into both the vision encoder and the MLP connector, thereby enhancing the multimodal LLMs with neglectable additional activated parameters during inference. CuMo first pre-trains the MLP blocks and then initializes each expert in the MoE block from the pre-trained MLP block during the visual instruction tuning stage, with auxiliary losses to ensure a balanced loading of experts. CuMo outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs across various VQA and visual-instruction-following benchmarks within each model size group, all while training exclusively on open-sourced datasets.

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