mPLUG-Owl3: Towards Long Image-Sequence Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models

TL;DR

mPLUG-Owl3 is a versatile multi-modal large language model designed to understand long image sequences, videos, and complex multi-image scenarios by integrating vision and language into a unified semantic space, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper introduces novel hyper attention blocks for efficient vision-language integration, enabling long sequence understanding in multi-modal large language models.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks.

Excels in ultra-long visual sequence processing.

Demonstrates robustness in distractor-rich environments.

Abstract

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in executing instructions for a variety of single-image tasks. Despite this progress, significant challenges remain in modeling long image sequences. In this work, we introduce the versatile multi-modal large language model, mPLUG-Owl3, which enhances the capability for long image-sequence understanding in scenarios that incorporate retrieved image-text knowledge, interleaved image-text, and lengthy videos. Specifically, we propose novel hyper attention blocks to efficiently integrate vision and language into a common language-guided semantic space, thereby facilitating the processing of extended multi-image scenarios. Extensive experimental results suggest that mPLUG-Owl3 achieves state-of-the-art performance among models with a similar size on single-image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. Moreover, we propose a challenging long visual sequence evaluation named Distractor Resistance to assess the ability of models to maintain focus amidst distractions. Finally, with the proposed architecture, mPLUG-Owl3 demonstrates outstanding performance on ultra-long visual sequence inputs. We hope that mPLUG-Owl3 can contribute to the development of more efficient and powerful multimodal large language models.