Papers › Keeping Yourself is Important in Downstream Tuning Multimodal Large Language Model

Keeping Yourself is Important in Downstream Tuning Multimodal Large Language Model

6 Mar 2025arXiv:2503.04543archive 2025-07-28

Wenke Huang, Jian Liang, Xianda Guo, Yiyang Fang, Guancheng Wan, Xuankun Rong, Chi Wen, Zekun Shi, Qingyun Li, Didi Zhu, Yanbiao Ma, Ke Liang, Bin Yang, He Li, Jiawei Shao, Mang Ye, Bo Du

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and linguistic reasoning to address complex tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. While MLLMs demonstrate remarkable versatility, MLLMs appears limited performance on special applications. But tuning MLLMs for downstream tasks encounters two key challenges: Task-Expert Specialization, where distribution shifts between pre-training and target datasets constrain target performance, and Open-World Stabilization, where catastrophic forgetting erases the model general knowledge. In this work, we systematically review recent advancements in MLLM tuning methodologies, classifying them into three paradigms: (I) Selective Tuning, (II) Additive Tuning, and (III) Reparameterization Tuning. Furthermore, we benchmark these tuning strategies across popular MLLM architectures and diverse downstream tasks to establish standardized evaluation analysis and systematic tuning principles. Finally, we highlight several open challenges in this domain and propose future research directions. To facilitate ongoing progress in this rapidly evolving field, we provide a public repository that continuously tracks developments: https://github.com/WenkeHuang/Awesome-MLLM-Tuning.

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General KnowledgeImage CaptioningLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelMultimodal Large Language ModelQuestion AnsweringVisual Question Answering

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