SPHINX: A Mixer of Weights, Visual Embeddings and Image Scales for Multi-modal Large Language Models

We present SPHINX, a versatile multi-modal large language model (MLLM) with a joint mixing of model weights, visual embeddings and image scales. First, for stronger vision-language alignment, we unfreeze the large language model (LLM) during pre-training, and introduce a weight mix strategy between LLMs trained by real-world and synthetic data. By directly integrating the weights from two domains, the mixed LLM can efficiently incorporate diverse semantics with favorable robustness. Then, we propose to extract comprehensive visual embeddings from various network architectures, pre-training paradigms, and information granularity, providing language models with more robust image representations. We further propose an efficient strategy aiming to better capture fine-grained appearances of high-resolution images. With a mixing of different scales and high-resolution sub-images, SPHINX attains exceptional visual parsing and reasoning performance on existing evaluation benchmarks. Based on our proposed joint mixing, SPHINX exhibits superior multi-modal understanding capabilities on a wide range of applications, with highlighted fine-grained visual recognition abilities such as region-level understanding, caption grounding, document layout detection, and human pose estimation. We hope our work may cast a light on the exploration of joint mixing in future MLLM research.