MoMa: Efficient Early-Fusion Pre-training with Mixture of Modality-Aware Experts
<|reference_start|>MoMa: Efficient Early-Fusion Pre-training with Mixture of Modality-Aware Experts: We introduce MoMa, a novel modality-aware mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture designed for pre-training mixed-modal, early-fusion language models. MoMa processes images and text in arbitrary sequences by dividing expert modules into modality-specific groups. These groups exclusively process designated tokens while employing learned routing within each group to maintain semantically informed adaptivity. Our empirical results reveal substantial pre-training efficiency gains through this modality-specific parameter allocation. Under a 1-trillion-token training budget, the MoMa 1.4B model, featuring 4 text experts and 4 image experts, achieves impressive FLOPs savings: 3.7x overall, with 2.6x for text and 5.2x for image processing compared to a compute-equivalent dense baseline, measured by pre-training loss. This outperforms the standard expert-choice MoE with 8 mixed-modal experts, which achieves 3x overall FLOPs savings (3x for text, 2.8x for image). Combining MoMa with mixture-of-depths (MoD) further improves pre-training FLOPs savings to 4.2x overall (text: 3.4x, image: 5.3x), although this combination hurts performance in causal inference due to increased sensitivity to router accuracy. These results demonstrate MoMa's potential to significantly advance the efficiency of mixed-modal, early-fusion language model pre-training, paving the way for more resource-efficient and capable multimodal AI systems.<|reference_end|>
@article{lin2024moma:,
    title={MoMa: Efficient Early-Fusion Pre-training with Mixture of Modality-Aware
  Experts},
    author={Xi Victoria Lin and Akshat Shrivastava and Liang Luo and Srinivasan
  Iyer and Mike Lewis and Gargi Ghosh and Luke Zettlemoyer and Armen Aghajanyan},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21770},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.21770},
    primaryClass={cs.AI cs.LG}
}