# ID-Align: RoPE-Conscious Position Remapping for Dynamic High-Resolution Adaptation in Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21465 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21465/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 35 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

## 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 35)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (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)
- [A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07396/) (2016)
- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04468/) (2024)
- [Honeybee: Locality-enhanced Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06742/) (2023)
- [SEED-Bench-2-Plus: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models with Text-Rich Visual Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16790/) (2024)
- [NVLM: Open Frontier-Class Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11402/) (2024)
- [Round and Round We Go! What makes Rotary Positional Encodings useful?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06205/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Large Language Model from A Data-centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16640/) (2024)
- [Learning to Encode Position for Transformer with Continuous Dynamical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09229/) (2020)
- [Encoding word order in complex embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12333/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Unseen Bias: How Norm Discrepancy in Pre-Norm MLLMs Leads to Visual Information Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08374/) (2025)
- [Human-Centric Image Captioning with Subject-Centered Spatial Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08300/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Currently, a prevalent approach for enhancing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) performance is to encode both the high-resolution version and the thumbnail of an image simultaneously. While effective, this method generates a large number of image tokens. When combined with the widely used Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), its long-term decay property hinders the interaction between high-resolution tokens and thumbnail tokens, as well as between text and image. To address these issues, we propose ID-Align, which alleviates these problems by reordering position IDs. In this method, high-resolution tokens inherit IDs from their corresponding thumbnail token while constraining the overexpansion of positional indices. Our experiments conducted within the LLaVA-Next framework demonstrate that ID-Align achieves significant improvements, including a 6.09% enhancement on MMBench's relation reasoning tasks and notable gains across multiple benchmarks. Our code is available at the following link: https://github.com/zooblastlbz/ID-Align.
