Prismer: A Vision-Language Model with Multi-Task Experts
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Recent vision-language models have shown impressive multi-modal generation capabilities. However, typically they require training huge models on massive datasets. As a more scalable alternative, we introduce Prismer, a data- and parameter-efficient vision-language model that leverages an ensemble of task-specific experts. Prismer only requires training of a small number of components, with the majority of network weights inherited from multiple readily-available, pre-trained experts, and kept frozen during training. By leveraging experts from a wide range of domains, we show Prismer can efficiently pool this expert knowledge and adapt it to various vision-language reasoning tasks. In our experiments, we show that Prismer achieves fine-tuned and few-shot learning performance which is competitive with current state-of-the-arts, whilst requiring up to two orders of magnitude less training data. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/prismer.
Key facts. Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 86 of its 103 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2023.
Builds on
86 of 103 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2022Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning29 Apr
- 2022Enabling Multimodal Generation on CLIP via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation12 Mar
- 2022BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation28 Jan
- 2021Scaling Up Vision-Language Pre-training for Image Captioning24 Nov
- 2021SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision24 Aug
Other references · 81
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
- 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
- 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,069
- 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,304
- 2016Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networkscited by 4,718
- 2019Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLPcited by 4,195
- 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,131
38 more
- 2021Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervisioncited by 3,848
- 2022OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Modelscited by 3,464
- 2017ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenescited by 3,088
- 2016Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotationscited by 2,646
- 2015VQA: Visual Question Answeringcited by 2,489
- 2022Emergent Abilities of Large Language Modelscited by 2,483
- 2021Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentationcited by 2,338
- 2019RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search spacecited by 2,261
- 2019ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Taskscited by 2,219
- 2014CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluationcited by 2,027
- 2022BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 1,968
- 2021Vision Transformers for Dense Predictioncited by 1,789
- 2019Towards VQA Models That Can Readcited by 1,696
- 2021Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillationcited by 1,612
- 2019LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformerscited by 1,548
- 2015Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Servercited by 1,447
- 2022CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Modelscited by 1,265
- 2021ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervisioncited by 1,224
- 2020Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Taskscited by 1,213
- 2021Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Conceptscited by 1,209
- 2021Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gophercited by 1,199
- 2021Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attentioncited by 1,089
- 2014Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptionscited by 966
- 2019VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representationscited by 954
- 2016COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Contextcited by 858
- 2022PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Modelcited by 762
- 2022OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Frameworkcited by 742
- 2021Scaling Vision with Sparse Mixture of Expertscited by 740
- 2022GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Modelcited by 711
- 2021Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Modelscited by 657
- 2018Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learningcited by 631
- 2021LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuningcited by 572
- 2018The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scalecited by 542
- 2022GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Languagecited by 536
- 2018End-to-End Multi-Task Learning with Attentioncited by 533
- 2022Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Languagecited by 513
- 2022Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without trainingcited by 507
- 2016Cross-stitch Networks for Multi-task Learningcited by 466
50 most cited of 81 All 81 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 10; 2024: 8; 2025: 10.
28 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2023Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulationcited by 163
- 2024Rethinking Inductive Biases for Surface Normal Estimationcited by 122
- 2023Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlookcited by 109
- 2023Bootstrapping Vision-Language Learning with Decoupled Language Pre-trainingcited by 28
- 2024Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 27
- 2024ProVision: Programmatically Scaling Vision-centric Instruction Data for Multimodal Language Modelscited by 21
- 2025Unifying Specialized Visual Encoders for Video Language Modelscited by 10
- 2024Elevating Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs with Visual Embedding Distillationcited by 9
- 2023Structural Information Guided Multimodal Pre-training for Vehicle-centric Perceptioncited by 7
- 2023GRID: A Platform for General Robot Intelligence Developmentcited by 6
- 2024ExoViP: Step-by-step Verification and Exploration with Exoskeleton Modules for Compositional Visual Reasoningcited by 6
16 more
- 2024On Moving Object Segmentation from Monocular Video with Transformerscited by 6
- 2025MEXA: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning with Dynamic Multi-Expert Aggregationcited by 6
- 2023Manipulating the Label Space for In-Context Classificationcited by 5
- 2025ToVE: Efficient Vision-Language Learning via Knowledge Transfer from Vision Expertscited by 5
- 2025Investigating Redundancy in Multimodal Large Language Models with Multiple Vision Encoderscited by 5
- 2024From Linguistic Giants to Sensory Maestros: A Survey on Cross-Modal Reasoning with Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2025HAWAII: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Modelscited by 4
- 2025Towards Multimodal Understanding via Stable Diffusion as a Task-Aware Feature Extractorcited by 3
- 2025METEOR: Multi-Encoder Collaborative Token Pruning for Efficient Vision Language Modelscited by 3
- 2023CLIP meets Model Zoo Experts: Pseudo-Supervision for Visual Enhancementcited by 2
- 2025Scope: Selective Cross-modal Orchestration of Visual Perception Expertscited by 2
- 2023Expanding Frozen Vision-Language Models without Retraining: Towards Improved Robot Perceptioncited by 1
- 2024Investigating the Scaling Effect of Instruction Templates for Training Multimodal Language Modelcited by 1
- 2023Apollo: Zero-shot MultiModal Reasoning with Multiple Expertscited by 0
- 2025VisCon-100K: Leveraging Contextual Web Data for Fine-tuning Vision Language Modelscited by 0
- 2025Manager: Aggregating Insights from Unimodal Experts in Two-Tower VLMs and MLLMscited by 0
- 2025Scope: Selective Cross-modal Orchestration of Visual Perception Experts14 Oct 2025
- 2025METEOR: Multi-Encoder Collaborative Token Pruning for Efficient Vision Language Models28 Jul 2025
- 2025Towards Multimodal Understanding via Stable Diffusion as a Task-Aware Feature Extractor9 Jul 2025
- 2025Investigating Redundancy in Multimodal Large Language Models with Multiple Vision Encoders4 Jul 2025
- 2025HAWAII: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Models23 Jun 2025
- 2025MEXA: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning with Dynamic Multi-Expert Aggregation20 Jun 2025
- 2025Manager: Aggregating Insights from Unimodal Experts in Two-Tower VLMs and MLLMs13 Jun 2025
- 2025ToVE: Efficient Vision-Language Learning via Knowledge Transfer from Vision Experts1 Apr 2025
- 2025VisCon-100K: Leveraging Contextual Web Data for Fine-tuning Vision Language Models14 Feb 2025
- 2025Unifying Specialized Visual Encoders for Video Language Models2 Jan 2025
- 2024Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey16 Dec 2024
- 2024Elevating Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs with Visual Embedding Distillation12 Dec 2024
16 more
- 2024Investigating the Scaling Effect of Instruction Templates for Training Multimodal Language Model11 Dec 2024
- 2024ProVision: Programmatically Scaling Vision-centric Instruction Data for Multimodal Language Models9 Dec 2024
- 2024On Moving Object Segmentation from Monocular Video with Transformers28 Nov 2024
- 2024From Linguistic Giants to Sensory Maestros: A Survey on Cross-Modal Reasoning with Large Language Models19 Sep 2024
- 2024ExoViP: Step-by-step Verification and Exploration with Exoskeleton Modules for Compositional Visual Reasoning5 Aug 2024
- 2024Rethinking Inductive Biases for Surface Normal Estimation1 Mar 2024
- 2023Structural Information Guided Multimodal Pre-training for Vehicle-centric Perception15 Dec 2023
- 2023Manipulating the Label Space for In-Context Classification1 Dec 2023
- 2023Apollo: Zero-shot MultiModal Reasoning with Multiple Experts25 Oct 2023
- 2023CLIP meets Model Zoo Experts: Pseudo-Supervision for Visual Enhancement21 Oct 2023
- 2023GRID: A Platform for General Robot Intelligence Development2 Oct 2023
- 2023Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation5 Sep 2023
- 2023Expanding Frozen Vision-Language Models without Retraining: Towards Improved Robot Perception31 Aug 2023
- 2023Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook25 Jul 2023
- 2023Bootstrapping Vision-Language Learning with Decoupled Language Pre-training13 Jul 2023
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models25 May 2023
- 2023Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulationcited by 163
- 2024ProVision: Programmatically Scaling Vision-centric Instruction Data for Multimodal Language Modelscited by 21
- 2024Elevating Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs with Visual Embedding Distillationcited by 9
- 2025Investigating Redundancy in Multimodal Large Language Models with Multiple Vision Encoderscited by 5
- 2025HAWAII: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Modelscited by 4
- 2025Towards Multimodal Understanding via Stable Diffusion as a Task-Aware Feature Extractorcited by 3
- 2025METEOR: Multi-Encoder Collaborative Token Pruning for Efficient Vision Language Modelscited by 3
- 2023CLIP meets Model Zoo Experts: Pseudo-Supervision for Visual Enhancementcited by 2
- 2025Scope: Selective Cross-modal Orchestration of Visual Perception Expertscited by 2
- 2023Expanding Frozen Vision-Language Models without Retraining: Towards Improved Robot Perceptioncited by 1
- 2024Investigating the Scaling Effect of Instruction Templates for Training Multimodal Language Modelcited by 1
- 2025VisCon-100K: Leveraging Contextual Web Data for Fine-tuning Vision Language Modelscited by 0
- 2025Scope: Selective Cross-modal Orchestration of Visual Perception Experts14 Oct 2025
- 2025METEOR: Multi-Encoder Collaborative Token Pruning for Efficient Vision Language Models28 Jul 2025
- 2025Towards Multimodal Understanding via Stable Diffusion as a Task-Aware Feature Extractor9 Jul 2025
- 2025Investigating Redundancy in Multimodal Large Language Models with Multiple Vision Encoders4 Jul 2025
- 2025HAWAII: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Models23 Jun 2025
- 2025VisCon-100K: Leveraging Contextual Web Data for Fine-tuning Vision Language Models14 Feb 2025
- 2024Elevating Visual Perception in Multimodal LLMs with Visual Embedding Distillation12 Dec 2024
- 2024Investigating the Scaling Effect of Instruction Templates for Training Multimodal Language Model11 Dec 2024
- 2024ProVision: Programmatically Scaling Vision-centric Instruction Data for Multimodal Language Models9 Dec 2024
- 2023CLIP meets Model Zoo Experts: Pseudo-Supervision for Visual Enhancement21 Oct 2023
- 2023Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation5 Sep 2023
- 2023Expanding Frozen Vision-Language Models without Retraining: Towards Improved Robot Perception31 Aug 2023
- 2025Unifying Specialized Visual Encoders for Video Language Modelscited by 10
- 2024ExoViP: Step-by-step Verification and Exploration with Exoskeleton Modules for Compositional Visual Reasoningcited by 6
- 2025MEXA: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning with Dynamic Multi-Expert Aggregationcited by 6
- 2024From Linguistic Giants to Sensory Maestros: A Survey on Cross-Modal Reasoning with Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2023Apollo: Zero-shot MultiModal Reasoning with Multiple Expertscited by 0
- 2025MEXA: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning with Dynamic Multi-Expert Aggregation20 Jun 2025
- 2025Unifying Specialized Visual Encoders for Video Language Models2 Jan 2025
- 2024From Linguistic Giants to Sensory Maestros: A Survey on Cross-Modal Reasoning with Large Language Models19 Sep 2024
- 2024ExoViP: Step-by-step Verification and Exploration with Exoskeleton Modules for Compositional Visual Reasoning5 Aug 2024
- 2023Apollo: Zero-shot MultiModal Reasoning with Multiple Experts25 Oct 2023
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2024Rethinking Inductive Biases for Surface Normal Estimationcited by 122
- 2023Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlookcited by 109
- 2024Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 27
- 2023Structural Information Guided Multimodal Pre-training for Vehicle-centric Perceptioncited by 7
- 2023GRID: A Platform for General Robot Intelligence Developmentcited by 6
- 2024On Moving Object Segmentation from Monocular Video with Transformerscited by 6
- 2023Manipulating the Label Space for In-Context Classificationcited by 5
- 2025ToVE: Efficient Vision-Language Learning via Knowledge Transfer from Vision Expertscited by 5
- 2025Manager: Aggregating Insights from Unimodal Experts in Two-Tower VLMs and MLLMscited by 0
- 2025Manager: Aggregating Insights from Unimodal Experts in Two-Tower VLMs and MLLMs13 Jun 2025
- 2025ToVE: Efficient Vision-Language Learning via Knowledge Transfer from Vision Experts1 Apr 2025
- 2024Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey16 Dec 2024
- 2024On Moving Object Segmentation from Monocular Video with Transformers28 Nov 2024
- 2024Rethinking Inductive Biases for Surface Normal Estimation1 Mar 2024
- 2023Structural Information Guided Multimodal Pre-training for Vehicle-centric Perception15 Dec 2023
- 2023Manipulating the Label Space for In-Context Classification1 Dec 2023
- 2023GRID: A Platform for General Robot Intelligence Development2 Oct 2023
- 2023Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook25 Jul 2023
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2024Prism: A Framework for Decoupling and Assessing the Capabilities of VLMs
- 2022Vision-Language Intelligence: Tasks, Representation Learning, and Large Models
- 2024How Vision-Language Tasks Benefit from Large Pre-trained Models: A Survey
- 2025Dynamic Knowledge Integration for Enhanced Vision-Language Reasoning
- 2023InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning
- 2025MoIIE: Mixture of Intra- and Inter-Modality Experts for Large Vision Language Models
- 2026Dynamo: Dynamic Skill-Tool Evolution for Vision-Language Agents
- 2022Localized Latent Updates for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models