Wednesday, March 27, 2024

On MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training

Recommendable! Just finished reading this latest research paper by researchers from Apple. It sheds some more light on the heuristics and "highly empirical endeavor" involved in machine learning & AI. It is a fairly well done study of different architectures and data sources.

From the abstract:
"In this work, we discuss building performant Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In particular, we study the importance of various architecture components and data choices. Through careful and comprehensive ablations of the image encoder, the vision language connector, and various pre-training data choices, we identified several crucial design lessons. For example, we demonstrate that for large-scale multimodal pre-training using a careful mix of image-caption, interleaved image-text, and text-only data is crucial for achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) few-shot results across multiple benchmarks, compared to other published pre-training results. Further, we show that the image encoder together with image resolution and the image token count has substantial impact, while the vision-language connector design is of comparatively negligible importance. By scaling up the presented recipe, we build MM1, a family of multimodal models up to 30B parameters, including both dense models and mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants, that are SOTA in pre-training metrics and achieve competitive performance after supervised fine-tuning on a range of established multimodal benchmarks. Thanks to large-scale pre-training, MM1 enjoys appealing properties such as enhanced in-context learning, and multi-image reasoning, enabling few-shot chain-of-thought prompting."

[2403.09611] MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training

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