Visual Representations inside the Language Model (2510.04819v1)

Abstract: Despite interpretability work analyzing VIT encoders and transformer activations, we don't yet understand why Multimodal LLMs (MLMs) struggle on perception-heavy tasks. We offer an under-studied perspective by examining how popular MLMs (LLaVA-OneVision, Qwen2.5-VL, and Llama-3-LLaVA-NeXT) process their visual key-value tokens. We first study the flow of visual information through the LLM, finding that image value tokens encode sufficient information to perform several perception-heavy tasks zero-shot: segmentation, semantic correspondence, temporal correspondence, and referring expression detection. We find that while the LLM does augment the visual information received from the projection of input visual encodings-which we reveal correlates with overall MLM perception capability-it contains less visual information on several tasks than the equivalent visual encoder (SigLIP) that has not undergone MLM finetuning. Further, we find that the visual information corresponding to input-agnostic image key tokens in later layers of LLMs contains artifacts which reduce perception capability of the overall MLM. Next, we discuss controlling visual information in the LLM, showing that adding a text prefix to the image input improves perception capabilities of visual representations. Finally, we reveal that if LLMs were able to better control their visual information, their perception would significantly improve; e.g., in 33.3% of Art Style questions in the BLINK benchmark, perception information present in the LLM is not surfaced to the output! Our findings reveal insights into the role of key-value tokens in multimodal systems, paving the way for deeper mechanistic interpretability of MLMs and suggesting new directions for training their visual encoder and LLM components.

• The paper demonstrates that visual key-value tokens gradually build perceptual details, but artifact tokens later degrade performance.
• The study compares MLMs with standalone visual encoders, revealing inefficiencies in tasks like semantic segmentation.
• Interventions such as blocking input-agnostic tokens improve performance, underscoring the need to refine visual processing in MLMs.

Visual Representations inside the LLM

Introduction

The paper of visual representations in Multimodal LLMs (MLMs) highlights the evolving understanding of how these models process visual information. Despite advancements, MLMs still exhibit limitations in handling perception-intensive tasks such as object localization, spatial reasoning, and semantic segmentation. This paper examines the flow and role of visual key-value tokens in prominent MLM architectures, including LLaVA-OneVision, Qwen2.5-VL, and Llama-3-LLaVA-NeXT, providing insights into their impact on the model's perceptual abilities.

Visual Token Processing and Representation

MLMs comprise a visual encoder coupled with a LLM. The visual encoder transforms image patches into representations that the LLM processes as key-value tokens. These tokens play a pivotal role in zero-shot task execution—segmentation, correspondence, and expression detection—demonstrating the encoded sufficiency of visual information despite MLMs' perceptual struggles.

Figure 1: We paper visual representations in the key-value cache within Mutimodal LLMs (MLMs), as they are uninfluenced by text (due to the causal nature of cross-modal attention) and directly contribute to the MLM output. Despite MLMs struggling on perception tasks, image value tokens still encode rich visual information.

Significantly, the distinction between input-dependent and input-agnostic key tokens becomes apparent in later LLM layers, with the latter introducing artifacts detrimental to perception performance.

Key Findings and Implications

Visual Information Flow

The key-value mechanism is instrumental in visual information propagation across the MLM's layers, with image values incrementally building perceptual details before a sharp decline. This serves as an analogous observation to semantic layer activations in text-only transformers.

Figure 2: Performance of each image value (bottom), and maximum per-layer image value performance (top). On segmentation tasks, visual information builds gradually in the first two-thirds of the LLM, then drops steeply.

Comparison with Visual Encoders

While MLMs' language components enrich visual data, their performance on vision tasks like semantic correspondence sees a noticeable shortfall when compared to standalone visual encoders without MLM tuning, such as SigLIP. This contrast points to potential inefficiencies in MLMs' internal handling and refinement of visual features.

Careful examination of PCA visualizations of image keys and the identification of input-agnostic tokens further elucidates these inefficiencies.

Figure 3: PCA visualization of all image keys in LLaVA-OneVision 7B for two COCO images. The input-agnostic image keys displayed are nearly constant across different images.

Interventions and Scalability

Interventions to mitigate artifact introduction—such as blocking text queries to input-agnostic keys—yielded improved perceptual performance. Further, adding textual prefixes to image inputs allowed models to dynamically harness and enhance visual representation fine-tuned to task-specific needs, a process leveraging causal attention inherent in transformer architectures.

Conclusion

This exploration into MLMs' visual token representation provides a foundational understanding of their mechanistic limits in perceptual tasks. Despite technological strides, MLMs' perceptual potential is constricted by artifact-prone visual representations and their suboptimal integration into LLMs. Future work should focus on refining these visual processes, possibly through enhanced training paradigms and dynamic attention mechanisms that better capture and utilize visual information. These steps will considerably advance MLMs' capability to bridge the perceptual reasoning gap, with implications extending across varied AI applications.