arXiv Machine Learning By Mo Shahdloo, Faegheh Sardari, Mathew Salvaris

Latent-Lens: Visual Perception in Small Language Models Through Latent Communication

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Latent‑Lens is a lightweight codec that enables a frozen vision‑language model (VLM) to communicate visual information to a frozen small language model (SLM) directly in latent space, avoiding the lossy bottleneck of discrete text. The codec uses a domain encoder to project VLM hidden states into the SLM’s embedding space and an attention decoder (a LoRA) that teaches the SLM to attend to these visual prefixes, training only about 1.6 M parameters (0.2 % of the combined model size). On visual question answering tasks (CLEVR, GQA) and image captioning (Flickr8k), Latent‑Lens significantly outperforms text‑based communication with the same LoRA budget, achieving up to +69.8 pp improvement on VQA and +18.8 pp on captioning.

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