Release v1.0.1

• Added LLaMA-2 support
• Full LoRA support. To make model training more accessible, we release a set of model weights based on LoRA, which supports training on academic resources (e.g. 4x A6000s, or 8x 3090s, without the need of CPU offloading)
• A more versatile design for training large multimodal models, including swapping different language models, vision encoders, and more coming soon
• Support higher resolution input using CLIP-ViT-L-336px as the vision encoder for a more detailed visual understanding
• Ablate and clean up some design choices to make the training simpler and smoother
• Full DeepSpeed support
• Improved model checkpoint saving during pretraining stage to save disk space
• Improved WebUI interface
• Improved support for inference with multiple-GPUs
• Support inference with 4-bit and 8-bit quantization
• Support interactive CLI inference

We train all models in this release using LLaVA-LCS-558K for pretraining and LLaVA-Instruct-80K for instruction tuning, to maintain an efficient and affordable training budget. The full training (including both pretraining and finetuning) can be completed within 6 hours on 8x 3090s.

We hope this release further benefits the community and makes large multimodal models more accessible.

Detailed Changes

• Tokenization. We remove the dependency of the additional tokens (<IM_START>, <IM_END>, <IM_PATCH>), so that during the pretraining stage, the tokenizer does not change at all and we only update the linear projector weights.
• Prompt.
  • Pretraining. We simplified the pretraining prompts by removing additional instructions like Describe the image details, which we find to allow the zero-shot inference and can slightly improve the training speed.
  • We keep the train/test prompt consistent, which we find to slightly improve the model's performance during the inference.