Phase Diagram of Vision Large Language Models Inference: A Perspective from Interaction across Image and Instruction

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) usually take input as a concatenation of image token embeddings and text token embeddings and conduct causal modeling. However, their internal behaviors remain underexplored, raising the question of interaction among two types of tokens. To investigate such multimodal interaction during model inference, in this paper, we measure the contextualization among the hidden state vectors of tokens from different modalities. Our experiments uncover a four-phase inference dynamics of VLLMs against the depth of Transformer-based LMs, including (I) Alignment: In very early layers, contextualization emerges between modalities, suggesting a feature space alignment. (II) Intra-modal Encoding: In early layers, intra-modal contextualization is enhanced while inter-modal interaction is suppressed, suggesting a local encoding within modalities. (III) Inter-modal Encoding: In later layers, contextualization across modalities is enhanced, suggesting a deeper fusion across modalities. (IV) Output Preparation: In very late layers, contextualization is reduced globally, and hidden states are aligned towards the unembedding space.