Once-Tuning-Multiple-Variants: Tuning Once and Expanded as Multiple Vision-Language Model Variants

Vision-language model (VLM) is one of the most important models for multi-modal tasks. Real industrial applications often meet the challenge of adapting VLMs to different scenarios, such as varying hardware platforms or performance requirements. Traditional methods involve training or finetuning to adapt multiple unique VLMs or using model compression techniques to create multiple compact models. These approaches are complex and resource-intensive. This paper introduces a novel paradigm called Once-Tuning-Multiple-Variants (OTMV). OTMV requires only a single tuning process to inject dynamic weight expansion capacity into the original VLM structure. This tuned VLM can then be expanded into multiple variants tailored for different scenarios in inference. The tuning mechanism of OTMV is inspired by the mathematical series expansion theorem, which helps to reduce the parameter size and memory requirements while maintaining accuracy for VLM. Experiment results show that OTMV-tuned models achieve comparable accuracy to baseline VLMs across various visual-language tasks. The experiments also demonstrate the dynamic expansion capability of OTMV-tuned VLMs, outperforming traditional model compression and adaptation techniques in terms of accuracy and efficiency.