PerceptionGPT: Effectively Fusing Visual Perception into LLM

The integration of visual inputs with large language models (LLMs) has led to remarkable advancements in multi-modal capabilities, giving rise to vision large language models (VLLMs). However, effectively harnessing LLMs for intricate visual perception tasks, such as detection and segmentation, remains a challenge. Conventional approaches achieve this by transforming perception signals (e.g., bounding boxes, segmentation masks) into sequences of discrete tokens, which struggle with the precision errors and introduces further complexities for training. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end framework named PerceptionGPT, which represent the perception signals using LLM's dynamic token embedding. Specifically, we leverage lightweight encoders and decoders to handle the perception signals in LLM's embedding space, which takes advantage of the representation power of the high-dimensional token embeddings. Our approach significantly eases the training difficulties associated with the discrete representations in prior methods. Furthermore, owing to our compact representation, the inference speed is also greatly boosted. Consequently, PerceptionGPT enables accurate, flexible and efficient handling of complex perception signals. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments. The results demonstrate significant improvements over previous methods with only 4% trainable parameters and less than 25% training time.