DeepAlign: Mitigating Modality Conflict through Modality-Specific Alignment

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising advancements in augmenting the capabilities of LLMs to comprehend visual input. However, modality misalignment between vision and text remains a key challenge in MLLM, which can be attributed to two aspects: misalignment of modality-specific representations and depletion of modality-specific details. To address the issue of modality misalignment, we propose DeepAlign, a novel multimodal alignment framework to mitigate modality conflict, which employs representation intervention and structure-induced knowledge distillation to prevent the misalignment and depletion of modality-specific information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeepAlign significantly mitigates modality conflicts, leading to substantial performance improvements compared to backbone models across multiple vision-language tasks. It also stimulates some emergent abilities in MLLMs, such as multimodal in-context learning on interleaved text-image sequences.