# Florence-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Generative Vision Encoder and Depth-Breadth Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04424 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04424/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 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 40 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 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 40)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (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)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [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)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07533/) (2023)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [FastVLM: Efficient Vision Encoding for Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13303/) (2024)
- [LLM-based Agents Suffer from Hallucinations: A Survey of Taxonomy, Methods, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18970/) (2025)
- [Visual Representation Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07979/) (2025)
- [Side Effects of Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15124/) (2025)
- [Analyzing the Impact of Low-Rank Adaptation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06330/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Visual Information Processing in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10301/) (2025)
- [Audio-Visual Flamingo: Open Audio-Visual Intelligence for Long and Complex Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16107/) (2026)
- [OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10635/) (2026)
- [LiMoDE: Rethinking Lifelong Robot Manipulation from a Mixture-of-Dynamic-Experts Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26183/) (2026)
- [Fine-Tuning Florence2 for Enhanced Object Detection in Un-constructed Environments: Vision-Language Model Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04918/) (2025)
- [An Evaluation of a Visual Question Answering Strategy for Zero-shot Facial Expression Recognition in Still Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21309/) (2025)
- [IMAIA: Interactive Maps AI Assistant for Travel Planning and Geo-Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06993/) (2025)
- [Towards Open World Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16527/) (2025)
- [Fusion to Enhance: Fusion Visual Encoder to Enhance Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00664/) (2025)
- [Omni-C: Compressing Heterogeneous Modalities into a Single Dense Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05528/) (2026)
- [FAVE: Foveated Adaptive Visual Encoding for Efficient Fine-Grained Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04392/) (2026)
- [ConvCue: Complementary Visual Inductive Biases for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34196/) (2026)
- [SIEVE: Selective attention-value Suppression for Vision-Language Models Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01962/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Florence-VL, a new family of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with enriched visual representations produced by Florence-2, a generative vision foundation model. Unlike the widely used CLIP-style vision transformer trained by contrastive learning, Florence-2 can capture different levels and aspects of visual features, which are more versatile to be adapted to diverse downstream tasks. We propose a novel feature-fusion architecture and an innovative training recipe that effectively integrates Florence-2's visual features into pretrained LLMs, such as Phi 3.5 and LLama 3. In particular, we propose "depth-breath fusion (DBFusion)" to fuse the visual features extracted from different depths and under multiple prompts. Our model training is composed of end-to-end pretraining of the whole model followed by finetuning of the projection layer and the LLM, on a carefully designed recipe of diverse open-source datasets that include high-quality image captions and instruction-tuning pairs. Our quantitative analysis and visualization of Florence-VL's visual features show its advantages over popular vision encoders on vision-language alignment, where the enriched depth and breath play important roles. Florence-VL achieves significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art MLLMs across various multi-modal and vision-centric benchmarks covering general VQA, perception, hallucination, OCR, Chart, knowledge-intensive understanding, etc. To facilitate future research, our models and the complete training recipe are open-sourced. https://github.com/JiuhaiChen/Florence-VL