MR-MLLM: Mutual Reinforcement of Multimodal Comprehension and Vision Perception

Abstract

In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in tasks like visual question answering and common sense reasoning, while visual perception models have made significant strides in perception tasks, such as detection and segmentation. However, MLLMs mainly focus on high-level image-text interpretations and struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, and vision perception models usually suffer from open-world distribution shifts due to their limited model capacity. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Mutually Reinforced Multimodal Large Language Model (MR-MLLM), a novel framework that synergistically enhances visual perception and multimodal comprehension. First, a shared query fusion mechanism is proposed to harmonize detailed visual inputs from vision models with the linguistic depth of language models, enhancing multimodal comprehension and vision perception synergistically. Second, we propose the perception-enhanced cross-modal integration method, incorporating novel modalities from vision perception outputs, like object detection bounding boxes, to capture subtle visual elements, thus enriching the understanding of both visual and textual data. In addition, an innovative perception-embedded prompt generation mechanism is proposed to embed perceptual information into the language model's prompts, aligning the responses contextually and perceptually for a more accurate multimodal interpretation. Extensive experiments demonstrate MR-MLLM's superior performance in various multimodal comprehension and vision perception tasks, particularly those requiring corner case vision perception and fine-grained language comprehension.