Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhance visual tasks by integrating visual representations into large language models (LLMs). The textual modality, inherited from LLMs, enables instruction following and in-context learning, while the visual modality boosts downstream task performance through rich semantic content, spatial information, and grounding capabilities. These modalities work synergistically across various visual tasks. Our research reveals a persistent imbalance between these modalities, with text often dominating output generation during visual instruction tuning, regardless of using full or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We found that re-balancing these modalities can significantly reduce trainable parameters, inspiring further optimization of visual instruction tuning. To this end, we introduce Modality Linear Representation-Steering (MoReS), which re-balances intrinsic modalities by steering visual representations through linear transformations in the visual subspace across each model layer. We validated our approach by developing LLaVA Steering, a suite of models using MoReS. Results show that LLaVA Steering requires, on average, 500 times fewer trainable parameters than LoRA while maintaining comparable performance across three visual benchmarks and eight visual question-answering tasks. Finally, we introduce the LLaVA Steering Factory, a platform that enables rapid customization of MLLMs with a component-based architecture, seamlessly integrating state-of-the-art models and evaluating intrinsic modality imbalance. This open-source project facilitates a deeper understanding of MLLMs within the research community.

The rapid progress of Large Language Models has advanced agentic systems in decision-making, coordination, and task execution. Yet, existing agentic system generation frameworks lack full autonomy, missing from-scratch agent generation, self-optimizing agent functionality, and collaboration, limiting adaptability and scalability. We propose **SwarmAgentic**, the *first framework that fully automates agentic system generation, optimization, and collaboration*, constructing agents from scratch and jointly refining functionality and coordination via language-driven exploration. To enable efficient search over system-level structures, SwarmAgentic maintains a population of candidate systems and evolves them via feedback-guided updates, drawing inspiration from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). We evaluate our method on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks involving high-level planning, system-level coordination, and creative reasoning. Given only a task description and an objective function, SwarmAgentic outperforms all baselines, achieving a **+261.8% relative improvement** over ADAS on the TravelPlanner benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of full automation in structurally unconstrained tasks. This framework marks a significant step toward scalable and autonomous agentic system design, bridging swarm intelligence with fully automated system multi-agent generation.