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

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

14 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.09611archive 2025-07-28

Brandon McKinzie, Zhe Gan, Jean-Philippe Fauconnier, Sam Dodge, BoWen Zhang, Philipp Dufter, Dhruti Shah, Xianzhi Du, Futang Peng, Floris Weers, Anton Belyi, Haotian Zhang, Karanjeet Singh, Doug Kang, Ankur Jain, Hongyu Hè, Max Schwarzer, Tom Gunter, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Jianyu Wang, Chong Wang, Nan Du, Tao Lei, Sam Wiseman, Guoli Yin, Mark Lee, ZiRui Wang, Ruoming Pang, Peter Grasch, Alexander Toshev, Yinfei Yang

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.

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Tasks

In-Context LearningMixture-of-ExpertsVisual Question Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet MM1-30B-Chat GPT-4 score 48.7 #73 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet MM1-3B-Chat GPT-4 score 43.7 #93 of 231 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering MM-Vet MM1-7B-Chat GPT-4 score 42.1 #99 of 231 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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