# Mixture of Cluster-conditional LoRA Experts for Vision-language Instruction Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12379 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12379/

## Key facts

- Cited by 106 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 75 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 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 / [Mixture of LoRA experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/mixture-of-lora-experts/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (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)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 106)

- [MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15947/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06204/) (2024)
- [MixLoRA: Enhancing Large Language Models Fine-Tuning with LoRA-based Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15159/) (2024)
- [Eyes Closed, Safety On: Protecting Multimodal LLMs via Image-to-Text Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09572/) (2024)
- [LISA: Layerwise Importance Sampling for Memory-Efficient Large Language Model Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17919/) (2024)
- [Cartridges: Lightweight and general-purpose long context representations via self-study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06266/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-MoLE: Sparse Mixture of LoRA Experts for Mitigating Data Conflicts in Instruction Finetuning MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16160/) (2024)
- [Automated Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models on Self-driving Corner Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10595/) (2024)
- [Personalized Pieces: Efficient Personalized Large Language Models through Collaborative Efforts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10471/) (2024)
- [Towards Modular LLMs by Building and Reusing a Library of LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11157/) (2024)
- [A Survey on LoRA of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11046/) (2024)
- [Learning to Route Among Specialized Experts for Zero-Shot Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05859/) (2024)
- [Harmonizing Visual Text Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16364/) (2024)
- [Self-Expansion of Pre-trained Models with Mixture of Adapters for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18886/) (2024)
- [Med-MoE: Mixture of Domain-Specific Experts for Lightweight Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10237/) (2024)
- [MoME: Mixture of Multimodal Experts for Generalist Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12709/) (2024)
- [EMOVA: Empowering Language Models to See, Hear and Speak with Vivid Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18042/) (2024)
- [Low-Rank Adaptation for Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00365/) (2024)
- [AdaMoLE: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with Adaptive Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00361/) (2024)
- [DetDiffusion: Synergizing Generative and Perceptive Models for Enhanced Data Generation and Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13304/) (2024)
- [Shortcut-connected Expert Parallelism for Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05019/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Small Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20011/) (2024)
- [MoPE-CLIP: Structured Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Models with Module-wise Pruning Error Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07839/) (2024)
- [MoE-Loco: Mixture of Experts for Multitask Locomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08564/) (2025)
- [Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts for Instruction Tuning on General Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02731/) (2024)
- [EEGMamba: Bidirectional State Space Model with Mixture of Experts for EEG Multi-task Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20254/) (2024)
- [Improving Factuality in Large Language Models via Decoding-Time Hallucinatory and Truthful Comparators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12325/) (2024)
- [Uni-Med: A Unified Medical Generalist Foundation Model For Multi-Task Learning Via Connector-MoE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17508/) (2024)
- [MiLoRA: Efficient Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18035/) (2024)
- [SMoLoRA: Exploring and Defying Dual Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13949/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 training tasks of different 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 the task-customized model parameters based on the instruction clusters. A separate universal expert is further incorporated to improve generalization capabilities of MoCLE for novel instructions. Extensive experiments on InstructBLIP and LLaVA demonstrate the effectiveness of MoCLE.