# Omni-SMoLA: Boosting Generalist Multimodal Models with Soft Mixture of Low-rank Experts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00968 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00968/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 49 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)
- Mixture-of-experts / [Multimodal MoE models](https://mlsanity.com/moe/multimodal-moe-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [OLMoE: Open Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02060/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06204/) (2024)
- [VisionLLM v2: An End-to-End Generalist Multimodal Large Language Model for Hundreds of Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08394/) (2024)
- [ScreenAI: A Vision-Language Model for UI and Infographics Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04615/) (2024)
- [Foundation Models for Video Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03770/) (2024)
- [Chart-based Reasoning: Transferring Capabilities from LLMs to VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12596/) (2024)
- [SearchLVLMs: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Augmenting Large Vision-Language Models by Searching Up-to-Date Internet Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14554/) (2024)
- [Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11181/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Visual Feature Aggregation for OCR-Free Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05254/) (2024)
- [VA-MoE: Variables-Adaptive Mixture of Experts for Incremental Weather Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02503/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Multi-Modal LLM Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05334/) (2024)
- [CAMEx: Curvature-aware Merging of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18821/) (2025)
- [Where is this coming from? Making groundedness count in the evaluation of Document VQA models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19120/) (2025)
- [LEO-MINI: An Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model using Conditional Token Reduction and Mixture of Multi-Modal Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04653/) (2025)
- [MoME: Mixture of Matryoshka Experts for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04136/) (2025)
- [Omni-AVSR: Towards Unified Multimodal Speech Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07253/) (2025)
- [How Many Experts Are Enough? Towards Optimal Semantic Specialization for Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19765/) (2025)
- [Complementarity-Supervised Spectral-Band Routing for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13340/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Efficient Mixture-of-Experts for Remote Sensing Modality-Missing Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11460/) (2025)
- [VIKSER: Visual Knowledge-Driven Self-Reinforcing Reasoning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00711/) (2025)
- [LiMoDE: Rethinking Lifelong Robot Manipulation from a Mixture-of-Dynamic-Experts Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26183/) (2026)
- [MoE-ViE: Mixture of Experts Vision Encoder for Efficient Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17402/) (2026)
- [Omni-C: Compressing Heterogeneous Modalities into a Single Dense Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05528/) (2026)
- [Tackling Multimodal Learning Challenges with Mixture-of-Expert: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27431/) (2026)
- [CoLT-Drive: Counterfactual Long-Tail Benchmarking and Knowledge-Preserving Adaptation for Driving Affordance Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00242/) (2026)
- [Generalist-Specialist Mixture-of-Experts for Rare Pathology Detection in Multimodal Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18688/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large multi-modal models (LMMs) exhibit remarkable performance across numerous tasks. However, generalist LMMs often suffer from performance degradation when tuned over a large collection of tasks. Recent research suggests that Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures are useful for instruction tuning, but for LMMs of parameter size around O(50-100B), the prohibitive cost of replicating and storing the expert models severely limits the number of experts we can use. We propose Omni-SMoLA, an architecture that uses the Soft MoE approach to (softly) mix many multimodal low rank experts, and avoids introducing a significant number of new parameters compared to conventional MoE models. The core intuition here is that the large model provides a foundational backbone, while different lightweight experts residually learn specialized knowledge, either per-modality or multimodally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the SMoLA approach helps improve the generalist performance across a broad range of generative vision-and-language tasks, achieving new SoTA generalist performance that often matches or outperforms single specialized LMM baselines, as well as new SoTA specialist performance.