OneLLM: One Framework to Align All Modalities with Language

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention due to their strong multimodal understanding capability. However existing works rely heavily on modality-specific encoders which usually differ in architecture and are limited to common modalities. In this paper we present OneLLM an MLLM that aligns eight modalities to language using a unified framework. We achieve this through a unified multimodal encoder and a progressive multimodal alignment pipeline. In detail we first train an image projection module to connect a vision encoder with LLM. Then we build a universal projection module (UPM) by mixing multiple image projection modules and dynamic routing. Finally we progressively align more modalities to LLM with the UPM. To fully leverage the potential of OneLLM in following instructions we also curated a comprehensive multimodal instruction dataset including 2M items from image audio video point cloud depth/normal map IMU and fMRI brain activity. OneLLM is evaluated on 25 diverse benchmarks encompassing tasks such as multimodal captioning question answering and reasoning where it delivers excellent performance. Code data model and online demo are available at https://github.com/csuhan/OneLLM