# MergeMix: A Unified Augmentation Paradigm for Visual and Multi-Modal Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23479 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23479/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 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 84 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 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 84)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [SimPO: Simple Preference Optimization with a Reference-Free Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14734/) (2024)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [LVOmniBench: Pioneering Long Audio-Video Understanding Evaluation for Omnimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19217/) (2026)
- [OmniZip: Audio-Guided Dynamic Token Compression for Fast Omnimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14582/) (2025)
- [PASA: A Principled Embedding-Space Watermarking Approach for LLM-Generated Text under Semantic-Invariant Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10977/) (2026)
- [EarlyTom: Early Token Compression Completes Fast Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30010/) (2026)
- [dMoE: dLLMs with Learnable Block Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30876/) (2026)
- [S2-FracMix: Label-Preserving Self-Saliency Mixup Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25784/) (2026)
- [InstructMixup: Instruction-Guided Salient Patch Editing for Robust Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19324/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language alignment in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). To align multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a stable choice but requires human annotations and lacks task generalizations, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) searches for better answers from reward signals but suffers from computational overhead and instability. To achieve balance among scalability, efficiency, and alignment generalizations, we propose MergeMix, a unified paradigm that bridges SFT and RL with an efficient Token Merge based Mixup augmentation. As for the Mixup policy, we generate contextual aligned mixed images with the corresponding labels according to the merged attention maps with cluster regions. Then, we enhance the preference-driven paradigm for MLLMs by building preference pairs with raw images and MergeMix-generated ones and optimizing the soft preference margin with the mixed SimPO loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MergeMix not only achieves dominant classification accuracy as an augmentation method but also improves generalization abilities and alignment of MLLMs, providing a new learning paradigm for preference alignment with training efficiency and stability.