# Ola: Pushing the Frontiers of Omni-Modal Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04328 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04328/

## Key facts

- Cited by 83 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (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)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04652/) (2024)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10759/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [Spatial-MLLM: Boosting MLLM Capabilities in Visual-based Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23747/) (2025)
- [Daily-Omni: Towards Audio-Visual Reasoning with Temporal Alignment across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17862/) (2025)
- [EgoLife: Towards Egocentric Life Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03803/) (2025)
- [Ego-R1: Chain-of-Tool-Thought for Ultra-Long Egocentric Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13654/) (2025)
- [OmniVideoBench: Towards Audio-Visual Understanding Evaluation for Omni MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10689/) (2025)
- [OmniVinci: Enhancing Architecture and Data for Omni-Modal Understanding LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15870/) (2025)
- [HumanOmniV2: From Understanding to Omni-Modal Reasoning with Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21277/) (2025)
- [How Far are VLMs from Visual Spatial Intelligence? A Benchmark-Driven Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18905/) (2025)
- [ViSpeak: Visual Instruction Feedback in Streaming Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12769/) (2025)
- [AVoCaDO: An Audiovisual Video Captioner Driven by Temporal Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10395/) (2025)
- [LongCat-Flash-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00279/) (2025)
- [Streaming Video Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21334/) (2025)
- [Towards Video Thinking Test: A Holistic Benchmark for Advanced Video Reasoning and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15028/) (2025)
- [LVOmniBench: Pioneering Long Audio-Video Understanding Evaluation for Omnimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19217/) (2026)
- [EgoExoBench: A Benchmark for First- and Third-person View Video Understanding in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18342/) (2025)
- [ShotBench: Expert-Level Cinematic Understanding in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21356/) (2025)
- [SparseMM: Head Sparsity Emerges from Visual Concept Responses in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05344/) (2025)
- [See, Hear, and Understand: Benchmarking Audiovisual Human Speech Understanding in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02231/) (2025)
- [M2-omni: Advancing Omni-MLLM for Comprehensive Modality Support with Competitive Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18778/) (2025)
- [R-4B: Incentivizing General-Purpose Auto-Thinking Capability in MLLMs via Bi-Mode Annealing and Reinforce Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21113/) (2025)
- [AV-Reasoner: Improving and Benchmarking Clue-Grounded Audio-Visual Counting for MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05328/) (2025)
- [SAVVY: Spatial Awareness via Audio-Visual LLMs through Seeing and Hearing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05414/) (2025)
- [High-Resolution Visual Reasoning via Multi-Turn Grounding-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05920/) (2025)
- [MCIF: Multimodal Crosslingual Instruction-Following Benchmark from Scientific Talks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19634/) (2025)
- [Understanding the Modality Gap: An Empirical Study on the Speech-Text Alignment Mechanism of Large Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12116/) (2025)
- [Active Perception Agent for Omnimodal Audio-Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23646/) (2025)
- [AVATAR: Reinforcement Learning to See, Hear, and Reason Over Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03100/) (2025)
- [OmniVideo-R1: Reinforcing Audio-visual Reasoning with Query Intention and Modality Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05847/) (2026)
- [RefineShot: Rethinking Cinematography Understanding with Foundational Skill Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02423/) (2025)
- [HumanSense: From Multimodal Perception to Empathetic Context-Aware Responses through Reasoning MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10576/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in large language models, particularly following GPT-4o, have sparked increasing interest in developing omni-modal models capable of understanding more modalities. While some open-source alternatives have emerged, there is still a notable lag behind specialized single-modality models in performance. In this paper, we present Ola, an Omni-modal Language model that achieves competitive performance across image, video, and audio understanding compared to specialized counterparts, pushing the frontiers of the omni-modal language model to a large extent. We conduct a comprehensive exploration of architectural design, data curation, and training strategies essential for building a robust omni-modal model. Ola incorporates advanced visual understanding and audio recognition capabilities through several critical and effective improvements over mainstream baselines. Moreover, we rethink inter-modal relationships during omni-modal training, emphasizing cross-modal alignment with video as a central bridge, and propose a progressive training pipeline that begins with the most distinct modalities and gradually moves towards closer modality alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ola surpasses existing open omni-modal LLMs across all modalities while achieving highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art specialized models of similar sizes. We aim to make Ola a fully open omni-modal understanding solution to advance future research in this emerging field. Model weights, code, and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/Ola-Omni/Ola.