Papers › Visual Anchors Are Strong Information Aggregators For Multimodal Large Language Model

Visual Anchors Are Strong Information Aggregators For Multimodal Large Language Model

28 May 2024arXiv:2405.17815archive 2025-07-28

Haogeng Liu, Quanzeng You, Xiaotian Han, Yongfei Liu, Huaibo Huang, Ran He, Hongxia Yang

In the realm of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), vision-language connector plays a crucial role to link the pre-trained vision encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its importance, the vision-language connector has been relatively less explored. In this study, we aim to propose a strong vision-language connector that enables MLLMs to achieve high accuracy while maintain low computation cost. We first reveal the existence of the visual anchors in Vision Transformer and propose a cost-effective search algorithm to extract them. Building on these findings, we introduce the Anchor Former (AcFormer), a novel vision-language connector designed to leverage the rich prior knowledge obtained from these visual anchors during pretraining, guiding the aggregation of information. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces computational costs by nearly two-thirds compared with baseline, while simultaneously outperforming baseline methods. This highlights the effectiveness and efficiency of AcFormer. Codes are available at https://github.com/liuhaogeng/Anchor-Former.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

liuhaogeng/anchor-former officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelMultimodal Large Language Model

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerVision Transformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections