magma-research

MAGMA -- Multimodal Augmentation of Generative Models through Adapter-based Finetuning

Paper Authors

Constantin Eichenberg, Sidney Black, Samuel Weinbach, Aleph Alpha

Letitia Parcalabescu, Anette Frank, Heidelberg University

Abstract

Large-scale pretraining is fast becoming the norm in Vision-Language (VL) modeling. However, prevailing VL approaches are limited by the requirement for labeled data and the use of complex multi-step pretraining objectives. We present MAGMA - a simple method for augmenting generative language models with additional modalities using adapter-based finetuning. Building on Frozen, we train a series of VL models that autoregressively generate text from arbitrary combinations of visual and textual input. The pretraining is entirely end-to-end using a single language modeling objective, simplifying optimization compared to previous approaches. Importantly, the language model weights remain unchanged during training, allowing for transfer of encyclopedic knowledge and in-context learning abilities from language pretraining. MAGMA outperforms Frozen on open-ended generative tasks, achieving state of the art results on the OKVQA benchmark and competitive results on a range of other popular VL benchmarks, while pretraining on 0.2% of the number of samples used to train SimVLM.

Paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05253

Repository

For the training and inference code, please refer to the magma repository on GitHub.

Model design