PerceptionGPT: Effectively Fusing Visual Perception into LLM
Renjie Pi Lewei Yao Jiahui Gao Jipeng Zhang Tong Zhang
The integration of visual inputs with large language models (LLMs) has led to
remarkable advancements in multi-modal capabilities, giving rise to visual
large language models (VLLMs). However, effectively harnessing VLLMs for
intricate visual perception tasks remains a challenge. In this paper, we
present a novel end-to-end framework named PerceptionGPT, which efficiently and
effectively equips the VLLMs with visual perception abilities by leveraging the
representation power of LLMs' token embedding. Our proposed method treats the
token embedding of the LLM as the carrier of spatial information, then leverage
lightweight visual task encoders and decoders to perform visual perception
tasks (e.g., detection, segmentation). Our approach significantly alleviates
the training difficulty suffered by previous approaches that formulate the
visual outputs as discrete tokens, and enables achieving superior performance
with fewer trainable parameters, less training data and shorted training time.
Moreover, as only one token embedding is required to decode the visual outputs,
the resulting sequence length during inference is significantly reduced.
Consequently, our approach enables accurate and flexible representations,
seamless integration of visual perception tasks, and efficient handling of a
multiple of visual outputs. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our
approach through extensive experiments. The results demonstrate significant
improvements over previous methods with much fewer trainable parameters and GPU
hours, which facilitates future research in enabling LLMs with visual
perception abilities.