LMEye: An Interactive Perception Network for Large Language Models

Current efficient approaches to building Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) mainly incorporate visual information into LLMs with a simple visual mapping network such as a linear projection layer, a multilayer perceptron (MLP), or Q-former from BLIP-2. Such networks project the image feature once and do not consider the interaction between the image and the human inputs. Hence, the obtained visual information without being connected to human intention may be inadequate for LLMs to generate intention-following responses, which we refer to as static visual information. To alleviate this issue, our paper introduces LMEye, a human-like eye with a play-and-plug interactive perception network, designed to enable dynamic interaction between LLMs and external visual information. It can allow the LLM to request the desired visual information aligned with various human instructions, which we term dynamic visual information acquisition. Specifically, LMEye consists of a simple visual mapping network to provide the basic perception of an image for LLMs. It also contains additional modules responsible for acquiring requests from LLMs, performing request-based visual information seeking, and transmitting the resulting interacted visual information to LLMs, respectively. In this way, LLMs act to understand the human query, deliver the corresponding request to the request-based visual information interaction module, and generate the response based on the interleaved multimodal information. We evaluate LMEye through extensive experiments on multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating that it significantly improves zero-shot performances on various multimodal tasks compared to previous methods, with fewer parameters. Moreover, we also verify its effectiveness and scalability on various language models and video understanding, respectively.