ViCo: A Multitask Video-enhanced and Cognition-preserving Modality Alignment Training Framework

The rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has brought significant breakthroughs to this field. However, current MLLMs typically rely on vision instruction tuning based on large language models (LLMs) to endow them with multimodal capabilities, which may lead to low video utilization and catastrophic forgetting due to the task-specific nature of vision instruction tuning. Take case of multiple-choice Video Question Answering (VideoQA) as an example, requiring only selecting correct answers makes it easier for LLMs to shortcut rather than fully comprehend video content. Moreover, the fixed task format of ’’predicting the correct option" risks catastrophic forgetting, which can cause LLMs to lose their origin cognitive abilities. To address this, we propose ViCo, a training framework that enables LLMs to perform a specific auxiliary tasks during vision instruction tuning, which helps the model leverage video information more thoroughly while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, thereby improving modality alignment and enhancing performance. We evaluate our method on several strong VideoQA benchmarks, where it outperforms all state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and generality. Additionally, we also provide extensive analysis on the video information utilization and catastrophic forgetting resulting. The code will be made available at https://github.com/dunknsabsw/ViCo.