不用额外模块,让视觉语言模型重拾语言能力。
LinguDistill: Recovering Linguistic Ability in Vision-Language Models via Selective Cross-Modal Distillation
- 用冻结的语言模型做教师,通过层间键值缓存共享实现跨模态监督。
- 在语言任务上恢复约10%的性能损失,视觉任务表现不变。
- 无需增加参数或修改结构,适合各类多模态模型快速优化。
将预训练语言模型(LM)适配为视觉语言模型(VLM)时,因多模态适应带来的表示偏移和跨模态干扰,会损害其原有的语言能力,且难以通过常规微调恢复。已有方法通常引入额外模块作为中间对齐层,增加架构复杂度和推理开销。本文提出LinguDistill,一种无适配器的蒸馏方法,利用原始冻结的LM作为教师,通过层间键值缓存共享机制,使教师能感知学生模型的多模态表示,从而实现视觉条件下的教师监督。我们选择性地蒸馏教师在语言密集型数据上的强语言信号,以恢复语言能力,同时保持学生在多模态任务中的视觉理解。实验表明,LinguDistill在语言与知识基准上恢复了约10%的性能损失,而视觉任务性能保持相当。结果证明,语言能力可在不增加额外模块的前提下有效恢复,为多模态模型的模态特异性退化问题提供高效实用的解决方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Adapting pretrained language models (LMs) into vision-language models (VLMs) can degrade their native linguistic capability due to representation shift and cross-modal interference introduced during multimodal adaptation. Such loss is difficult to recover, even with targeted task-specific fine-tuning using standard objectives. Prior recovery approaches typically introduce additional modules that act as intermediate alignment layers to maintain or isolate modality-specific subspaces, which increases architectural complexity, adds parameters at inference time, and limits flexibility across models and settings. We propose LinguDistill, an adapter-free distillation method that restores linguistic capability by utilizing the original frozen LM as a teacher. We overcome the key challenge of enabling vision-conditioned teacher supervision by introducing layer-wise KV-cache sharing, which exposes the teacher to the student's multimodal representations without modifying the architecture of either model. We then selectively distill the teacher's strong linguistic signal on language-intensive data to recover language capability, while preserving the student's visual grounding on multimodal tasks. As a result, LinguDistill recovers $\sim$10% of the performance lost on language and knowledge benchmarks, while maintaining comparable performance on vision-heavy tasks. Our findings demonstrate that linguistic capability can be recovered without additional modules, providing an efficient and practical solution to modality-specific degradation in multimodal models.
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