LLaVA-FA: Learning Fourier Approximation for Compressing Large Multimodal Models

Abstract

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved impressive performance on various vision-language tasks, but their substantial computational and memory costs hinder their practical deployment. Existing compression methods often decouple low-rank decomposition and quantization, leading to compounded reconstruction errors, especially in multimodal architectures with cross-modal redundancy. To address this issue, we propose LLaVA-FA, a novel efficient LMM that performs joint low-rank plus quantization approximation in the frequency domain. By leveraging the de-correlation and conjugate symmetry properties of Fourier transform, LLaVA-FA achieves more compact and accurate weight representations. Furthermore, we introduce PolarQuant, a polar-coordinate quantization method tailored for complex matrices, and an optional diagonal calibration (ODC) scheme that eliminates the need for large-scale calibration data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed LLaVA-FA outperforms existing efficient multimodal models across multiple benchmarks while maintaining minimal activated parameters and low computational costs, validating its effectiveness as a powerful solution for compressing LMMs.