We introduce Cambrian-1, a family of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) designed with a vision-centric approach. While stronger language models can enhance multimodal capabilities, the design choices for vision components are often insufficiently explored and disconnected from visual representation learning research. This gap hinders accurate sensory grounding in real-world scenarios. Our study uses LLMs and visual instruction tuning as an interface to evaluate various visual representations, offering new insights into different models and architectures -- self-supervised, strongly supervised, or combinations thereof -- based on experiments with over 20 vision encoders. We critically examine existing MLLM benchmarks, addressing the difficulties involved in consolidating and interpreting results from various tasks, and introduce a new vision-centric benchmark, CV-Bench. To further improve visual grounding, we propose the Spatial Vision Aggregator (SVA), a dynamic and spatially-aware connector that integrates high-resolution vision features with LLMs while reducing the number of tokens. Additionally, we discuss the curation of high-quality visual instruction-tuning data from publicly available sources, emphasizing the importance of data source balancing and distribution ratio. Collectively, Cambrian-1 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also serves as a comprehensive, open cookbook for instruction-tuned MLLMs. We provide model weights, code, supporting tools, datasets, and detailed instruction-tuning and evaluation recipes. We hope our release will inspire and accelerate advancements in multimodal systems and visual representation learning.

我们引入了Cambrian-1，一种以视觉为中心的多模态LLMs（MLLMs）系列，通过视觉指导调整作为接口，评估各种视觉表示，并提出了空间视觉聚合器（SVA）来进一步改进视觉定位，同时降低标记数量。此外，我们讨论了从公开可用的资源中策划高质量的视觉指导调整数据的重要性，并提供了模型权重、代码、支持工具、数据集以及详细的指导调整和评估方案，希望我们的发布能够激发和加速多模态系统和视觉表示学习的进步。

Cambrian-1：全面开放、以视觉为中心的多模态LLMs研究