Expedited Training of Visual Conditioned Language Generation via Redundancy Reduction
Yiren Jian, Tingkai Liu, Yunzhe Tao, Chunhui Zhang, Soroush Vosoughi, Hongxia Yang
Abstract
We introduce EVLGen, a streamlined framework designed for the pre-training of visually conditioned language generation models with high computational demands, utilizing frozen pre-trained large language models (LLMs). The conventional approach in vision-language pre-training (VLP) typically involves a two-stage optimization process: an initial resource-intensive phase dedicated to general-purpose vision-language representation learning, focused on extracting and consolidating relevant visual features. This is followed by a subsequent phase that emphasizes end-to-end alignment between visual and linguistic modalities. Our novel one-stage, single-loss framework bypasses the computationally demanding first training stage by gradually merging similar visual tokens during training, while avoiding model collapse caused by single-stage training of BLIP-2 type models. The gradual merging process effectively condenses visual information while preserving semantic richness, resulting in rapid convergence without compromising performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that our approach accelerates the training of vision-language models by a factor of 5 without a noticeable impact on overall performance. Furthermore, we illustrate that our models significantly narrow the performance gap to current vision-language models using only 1/10 of the data. Finally, we showcase how our image-text models can seamlessly adapt to video-conditioned language generation tasks through novel soft attentive temporal token contextualizing modules. Code: https://github.com/yiren-jian/EVLGen- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.19
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 300–314
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.acl-long.19/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.19
- Cite (ACL):
- Yiren Jian, Tingkai Liu, Yunzhe Tao, Chunhui Zhang, Soroush Vosoughi, and Hongxia Yang. 2024. Expedited Training of Visual Conditioned Language Generation via Redundancy Reduction. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 300–314, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Expedited Training of Visual Conditioned Language Generation via Redundancy Reduction (Jian et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.acl-long.19.pdf