# HIRE: Lightweight High-Resolution Image Feature Enrichment for Multimodal LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 9 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 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, 9 of 9)

- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [FeatUp: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Features at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10516/) (2024)
- [When Do We Not Need Larger Vision Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13043/) (2024)
- [LiFT: A Surprisingly Simple Lightweight Feature Transform for Dense ViT Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14625/) (2024)

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

- [Evaluating Variance in Visual Question Answering Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02645/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The integration of high-resolution image features in modern multimodal large language models has demonstrated significant improvements in fine-grained visual understanding tasks, achieving high performance across multiple benchmarks. Since these features are obtained from large image encoders like ViT, they come with a significant increase in computational costs due to multiple calls to these encoders. In this work, we first develop an intuition for feature upsampling as a natural extension of high-resolution feature generation. Through extensive experiments and ablations, we demonstrate how a shallow feature enricher can achieve competitive results with tremendous reductions in training and inference time as well as computational cost, with upto 1.5x saving in FLOPs.
