# Visual Anchors Are Strong Information Aggregators For Multimodal Large Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 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 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [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)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [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)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08914/) (2023)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [Monkey: Image Resolution and Text Label Are Important Things for Large Multi-modal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06607/) (2023)
- [OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16527/) (2023)
- [SPHINX: The Joint Mixing of Weights, Tasks, and Visual Embeddings for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07575/) (2023)
- [Honeybee: Locality-enhanced Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06742/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [DocKylin: A Large Multimodal Model for Visual Document Understanding with Efficient Visual Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19101/) (2024)
- [Lifting the Veil on Visual Information Flow in MLLMs: Unlocking Pathways to Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13108/) (2025)
- [ST3: Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Model by Spatial-Temporal Visual Token Trimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20105/) (2024)
- [Zoom-Refine: Boosting High-Resolution Multimodal Understanding via Localized Zoom and Self-Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01663/) (2025)
- [When Continue Learning Meets Multimodal Large Language Model: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01887/) (2025)
- [Thinking with Deltas: Incentivizing Reinforcement Learning via Differential Visual Reasoning Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06801/) (2026)
- [Improving GUI Grounding with Explicit Position-to-Coordinate Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03230/) (2025)
- [ResComEmb: Effective and Efficient Multimodal Embedding via Residual Homogeneity Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37225/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the realm of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), vision-language connector plays a crucial role to link the pre-trained vision encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its importance, the vision-language connector has been relatively less explored. In this study, we aim to propose a strong vision-language connector that enables MLLMs to achieve high accuracy while maintain low computation cost. We first reveal the existence of the visual anchors in Vision Transformer and propose a cost-effective search algorithm to extract them. Building on these findings, we introduce the Anchor Former (AcFormer), a novel vision-language connector designed to leverage the rich prior knowledge obtained from these visual anchors during pretraining, guiding the aggregation of information. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces computational costs by nearly two-thirds compared with baseline, while simultaneously outperforming baseline methods. This highlights the effectiveness and efficiency of AcFormer. Codes are available at https://github.com/liuhaogeng/Anchor-Former.