Octavius: Mitigating Task Interference in MLLMs via LoRA-MoE

Recent studies have demonstrated Large Language Models (LLMs) can extend their zero-shot generalization capabilities to multimodal learning through instruction tuning. As more modalities and downstream tasks are introduced, negative conflicts and interference may have a worse impact on performance. While this phenomenon has been overlooked in previous work, we propose a novel and extensible framework, called Octavius, for comprehensive studies and experimentation on multimodal learning with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Specifically, to mitigate the interference, we combine the concept of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with LoRA and design a multimodal LoRA-MoE decoder for task- and modality-specific learning. To the best of our knowledge, we are one of the pioneering efforts to introduce MoE into MLLMs to address this problem. The experimental results (about 20% improvement) have shown the effectiveness and versatility of our design in various 2D and 3D downstream tasks. Code and corresponding dataset will be availablesoon.