Mixture of Cluster-Conditional LoRA Experts for Vision-Language Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning of Large Vision-language Models (LVLMs) has revolutionized the development of versatile models with zero-shot generalization across a wide range of downstream vision-language tasks. However, the diversity of different training tasks from various sources and formats would lead to inevitable task conflicts, where different tasks conflict for the same set of model parameters, resulting in sub-optimal instruction-following abilities. To address that, we propose the Mixture of Cluster-conditional LoRA Experts (MoCLE), a novel Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture designed to activate task-customized model parameters based on instruction clusters. A separate universal expert is further incorporated to improve generalization abilities of MoCLE for novel instructions. Extensive experiments on InstructBLIP and LLaVA demonstrate the effectiveness of MoCLE.