MaD-Mix: Multi-Modal Data Mixtures via Latent Space Coupling for Vision-Language Model Training
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → MLLM training and visual instruction tuning
Abstract (arXiv)
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are typically trained on a diverse set of multi-modal domains, yet current practices rely on costly manual tuning. We propose MaD-Mix, a principled and computationally efficient framework that derives multi-modal data mixtures for VLM training. MaD-Mix formulates data mixing as modality-aware domain alignment maximization and obtains closed-form multi-modal alignment scores from the Fenchel dual through inter-modal coupling variables. MaD-Mix systematically handles domains with missing modalities, allowing for the integration of language-only domains. Empirical evaluations across 0.5B and 7B models demonstrate that MaD-Mix accelerates VLM training across diverse benchmarks. MaD-Mix matches human-tuned data mixtures using 22% fewer training steps in image-text instruction tuning. In complex tri-modal video-image-text scenarios, where manual tuning becomes impractical, MaD-Mix boosts average accuracy over uniform weights, with negligible mixture computation overhead (< 1 GPU-hour), enabling scalable mixture design for modern VLM pipelines.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 109 of its 131 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2026.
Builds on
109 of 131 references.
Closest ancestors · 17
Same direction, newest first
- 2025VisualWebInstruct: Scaling up Multimodal Instruction Data through Web Search13 Mar
- 2024Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling6 Dec
- 2024Infinity-MM: Scaling Multimodal Performance with Large-Scale and High-Quality Instruction Data24 Oct
- 2024A Survey on Multimodal Benchmarks: In the Era of Large AI Models21 Sep
- 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution18 Sep
- 2024LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer6 Aug
- 2024LMMs-Eval: Reality Check on the Evaluation of Large Multimodal Models17 Jul
- 2024Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs24 Jun
- 2024A Survey of Multimodal Large Language Model from A Data-centric Perspective26 May
- 2024Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning18 Feb
- 2024Efficient Multimodal Learning from Data-centric Perspective18 Feb
- 2023ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions21 Nov
5 more
- 2023Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning5 Oct
- 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?12 Jul
- 2023A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models23 Jun
- 2023InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning11 May
- 2023Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning5 May
Other references · 92
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
- 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
- 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
- 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
- 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,411
- 2022Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learningcited by 4,337
- 2023Qwen Technical Reportcited by 3,273
- 2022Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Modelscited by 2,927
- 2023MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Modelscited by 2,689
- 2019ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Taskscited by 2,219
38 more
- 2023Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyondcited by 2,179
- 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,044
- 2022Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answeringcited by 1,881
- 2022ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoningcited by 1,449
- 2016CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoningcited by 1,445
- 2020DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Imagescited by 1,288
- 2019Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalizationcited by 1,232
- 2023MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,086
- 2017Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomycited by 1,004
- 2024Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?cited by 893
- 2018VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind Peoplecited by 852
- 2016A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Imagescited by 793
- 2021NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actionscited by 735
- 2022A-OKVQA: A Benchmark for Visual Question Answering using World Knowledgecited by 702
- 2023DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasetscited by 635
- 2024MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?cited by 573
- 2019ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answeringcited by 559
- 2020The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memescited by 485
- 2023OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Modelscited by 466
- 2020TextCaps: a Dataset for Image Captioning with Reading Comprehensioncited by 398
- 2024InternLM2 Technical Reportcited by 391
- 2023DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretrainingcited by 385
- 2021Inter-GPS: Interpretable Geometry Problem Solving with Formal Language and Symbolic Reasoningcited by 376
- 2022Dynamic Prompt Learning via Policy Gradient for Semi-structured Mathematical Reasoningcited by 347
- 2024Magpie: Alignment Data Synthesis from Scratch by Prompting Aligned LLMs with Nothingcited by 341
- 2018DVQA: Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answeringcited by 338
- 2023PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answeringcited by 333
- 2024What matters when building vision-language models?cited by 321
- 2015Visual7W: Grounded Question Answering in Imagescited by 315
- 2017FigureQA: An Annotated Figure Dataset for Visual Reasoningcited by 314
- 2023Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Modelscited by 310
- 2022Visual Spatial Reasoningcited by 288
- 2023LLaVAR: Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning for Text-Rich Image Understandingcited by 272
- 2021IconQA: A New Benchmark for Abstract Diagram Understanding and Visual Language Reasoningcited by 262
- 2024A Survey on Data Selection for Language Modelscited by 230
- 2019RAVEN: A Dataset for Relational and Analogical Visual rEasoNingcited by 225
- 2025Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multi-Discipline Professional Videoscited by 225
- 2023G-LLaVA: Solving Geometric Problem with Multi-Modal Large Language Modelcited by 208
50 most cited of 92 All 92 (JSON)
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2024Deciphering Cross-Modal Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models with Modality Integration Rate
- 2025Better Reasoning with Less Data: Enhancing VLMs Through Unified Modality Scoring
- 2026Cross-Modal Redundancy and the Geometry of Vision-Language Embeddings
- 2026DataComp-VLM: Improved Open Datasets for Vision-Language Models
- 2025Unified modality separation: A vision-language framework for unsupervised domain adaptation
- 2025MoIIE: Mixture of Intra- and Inter-Modality Experts for Large Vision Language Models
- 2023TiMix: Text-aware Image Mixing for Effective Vision-Language Pre-training
- 2025MergeMix: A Unified Augmentation Paradigm for Visual and Multi-Modal Understanding