MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces MoE-LLaVA, a sparse vision-language model using Mixture of Experts that achieves high performance with significantly fewer active parameters, reducing costs while maintaining or surpassing larger models.

Contribution

The paper proposes MoE-Tuning and MoE-LLaVA, novel methods for constructing sparse, efficient large vision-language models with competitive performance.

Findings

MoE-LLaVA achieves comparable performance to larger models with only 3B active parameters.

MoE-LLaVA surpasses larger models in object hallucination benchmarks.

The approach reduces training and inference costs significantly.

Abstract

Recent advances demonstrate that scaling Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) effectively improves downstream task performances. However, existing scaling methods enable all model parameters to be active for each token in the calculation, which brings massive training and inferring costs. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy MoE-Tuning for LVLMs. This strategy innovatively addresses the common issue of performance degradation in multi-modal sparsity learning, consequently constructing a sparse model with an outrageous number of parameters but a constant computational cost. Furthermore, we present the MoE-LLaVA, a MoE-based sparse LVLM architecture, which uniquely activates only the top-k experts through routers during deployment, keeping the remaining experts inactive. Extensive experiments show the significant performance of MoE-LLaVA in a variety of visual understanding and object hallucination benchmarks. Remarkably, with only approximately 3B sparsely activated parameters, MoE-LLaVA demonstrates performance comparable to the LLaVA-1.5-7B on various visual understanding datasets and even surpasses the LLaVA-1.5-13B in object hallucination benchmark. Through MoE-LLaVA, we aim to establish a baseline for sparse LVLMs and provide valuable insights for future research in developing more efficient and effective multi-modal learning systems. Code is released at https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/MoE-LLaVA.