In the realm of multimodal research, numerous studies leverage substantial image-text pairs to conduct modal alignment learning, transforming Large Language Models (LLMs) into Multimodal LLMs and excelling in a variety of visual-language tasks. The prevailing methodologies primarily fall into two categories: self-attention-based and cross-attention-based methods. While self-attention-based methods offer superior data efficiency due to their simple MLP architecture, they often suffer from lower computational efficiency due to concatenating visual and textual tokens as input for LLM. Conversely, cross-attention-based methods, although less data-efficient due to additional learnable parameters, exhibit higher computational efficiency by avoiding long sequence input for LLM. To address these trade-offs, we introduce the Data-Efficient and Compute-Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model (EE-MLLM). Without introducing additional modules or learnable parameters, EE-MLLM achieves both data and compute efficiency. Specifically, we modify the original self-attention mechanism in MLLM to a composite attention mechanism. This mechanism has two key characteristics: 1) Eliminating the computational overhead of self-attention within visual tokens to achieve compute efficiency, and 2) Reusing the weights on each layer of LLM to facilitate effective modality alignment between vision and language for data efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of EE-MLLM across a range of benchmarks, including general-purpose datasets like MMBench and SeedBench, as well as fine-grained tasks such as TextVQA and DocVQA.

本研究解决了当前多模态大型语言模型中数据和计算效率之间的权衡问题。提出的EE-MLLM通过改进原有的自注意力机制，采用组合注意力机制，既不增加额外模块或可学习参数，又有效提升了数据和计算效率。实验结果验证了EE-MLLM在多个基准测试上的优越性能，具有显著的潜在影响。

EE-MLLM：一种数据高效和计算高效的多模态大型语言模型