# D-Attn: Decomposed Attention for Large Vision-and-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01906/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Vidi: Large Multimodal Models for Video Understanding and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15681/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large vision-and-language models (LVLMs) have traditionally integrated visual and textual tokens by concatenating them into a single homogeneous input for large language models (LLMs), thereby maximally preserving the pre-trained language capabilities. However, this constrained architecture for visual and textual tokens restricts the design space for processing visual tokens, potentially leading to suboptimal performance and efficiency. In this paper, we propose Decomposed Attention (D-Attn), a more flexible attention architecture for LVLMs, which enables modification of visual token operations without affecting textual-to-textual attention. D-Attn decomposes the 1-D causal self-attention of LVLMs into visual-to-visual, textual-to-visual, and textual-to-textual attentions, and the visual and textual output tokens from the decomposed attentions are merged with a carefully derived weighting strategy, namely α-weighting. Taking advantage of the flexibility, we are able to introduce two critical improvements in visual token processing while maintaining the capacity of pre-trained LLMs: 1) We rectify the biased positional encoding in textual-to-visual attention to boost visual understanding performance. 2) We diagonalize visual-to-visual attention to reduce computation complexity from O(|V|2) to O(|V|) for |V| visual tokens without compromising performance. Extensive experiments and analysis validate the effectiveness of D-Attn, demonstrating significant improvements on multiple image benchmarks while significantly reducing computational costs (eg, 5× faster). Code will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/DecomposedAttention.