arXiv:2503.03321cs.CVcs.AI2025-03ICLR被引 143

发现大模型看图时会盲目关注无关图像区域,提出方法重分配注意力提升视觉理解。

See What You Are Told: Visual Attention Sink in Large Multimodal Models

  • 识别出视觉注意力黑洞:特定图像令牌被过度关注且无关紧要
  • 移除这些无效注意力令牌不影响性能,释放出可用注意力资源
  • 无需训练即可提升多类视觉任务表现,适合所有主流大模型

大型多模态模型(LMMs)通过变压器解码器中文本与视觉标记之间的注意力机制来‘看’图像。理想情况下,模型应聚焦于与文本相关的关键视觉信息。然而,近期研究发现,即使某些视觉标记与对应文本无关,模型仍倾向于持续赋予其高注意力权重。本研究探究了这些无关视觉标记出现的成因,发现其源于特定隐藏状态维度的大量激活,类似语言模型中的注意力黑洞。因此,我们将此现象称为视觉注意力黑洞。分析表明,移除这些无关的视觉黑洞标记不会影响模型性能,尽管它们接收了高注意力权重。基于此,我们将其注意力资源回收并重新分配,以增强对图像的有效关注。为此,我们提出视觉注意力重分配(VAR),一种在以图像为中心的注意力头中重新分配注意力的方法。实验结果表明,VAR可在不需额外训练、模型或推理步骤的情况下,显著提升多种任务(包括通用视觉-语言任务、视觉幻觉任务及视觉主导任务)的表现,为改进LMMs的多模态能力提供新路径。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However, recent findings indicate that LMMs have an extraordinary tendency to consistently allocate high attention weights to specific visual tokens, even when these tokens are irrelevant to the corresponding text. In this study, we investigate the property behind the appearance of these irrelevant visual tokens and examine their characteristics. Our findings show that this behavior arises due to the massive activation of certain hidden state dimensions, which resembles the attention sink found in language models. Hence, we refer to this phenomenon as the visual attention sink. In particular, our analysis reveals that removing the irrelevant visual sink tokens does not impact model performance, despite receiving high attention weights. Consequently, we recycle the attention to these tokens as surplus resources, redistributing the attention budget to enhance focus on the image. To achieve this, we introduce Visual Attention Redistribution (VAR), a method that redistributes attention in image-centric heads, which we identify as innately focusing on visual information. VAR can be seamlessly applied across different LMMs to improve performance on a wide range of tasks, including general vision-language tasks, visual hallucination tasks, and vision-centric tasks, all without the need for additional training, models, or inference steps. Experimental results demonstrate that VAR enables LMMs to process visual information more effectively by adjusting their internal attention mechanisms, offering a new direction to enhancing the multimodal capabilities of LMMs.

多模态模型注意力机制视觉理解模型优化

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