*NOTE: This is a technical preview. We are still running hyperparameter search, and will release the final model soon.  If you'd like to contribute to this, please contact us.*

:llama: **-Introduction-** [Llama 2 is an open-source LLM released by Meta AI](https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/llama-2/) today (July 18, 2023). Compared with its early version [Llama 1](https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/), Llama 2 is more favored in ***stronger language performance***, ***longer context window***, and importantly ***commercially usable***! While Llama 2 is changing the LLM market landscape in the language space, its multimodal ability remains unknown. We quickly develop the LLaVA variant based on the latest Llama 2 checkpoints, and release it to the community for the public use.

You need to apply for and download the latest Llama 2 checkpoints to start your own training (apply [here](https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-downloads/))


## Training

Please checkout [`pretrain.sh`](https://github.com/haotian-liu/LLaVA/blob/main/scripts/pretrain.sh), [`finetune.sh`](https://github.com/haotian-liu/LLaVA/blob/main/scripts/finetune.sh), [`finetune_lora.sh`](https://github.com/haotian-liu/LLaVA/blob/main/scripts/finetune_lora.sh).

## LLaVA (based on Llama 2), What is different? 

:volcano: How is the new LLaVA based on Llama 2 different from Llama 1? The comparisons of the training process are described:
- **Pre-training**. The pre-trained base LLM is changed from Llama 1 to Llama 2
- **Language instruction-tuning**. The previous LLaVA model starts with Vicuna, which is instruct tuned on ShareGPT data from Llama 1; The new LLaVA model starts with Llama 2 Chat, which is an instruct tuned checkpoint on dialogue data from Llama 2.
- **Multimodal instruction-tuning**. The same LLaVA-Lighting process is applied.


### Results

- Llama 2 is better at following the instructions of role playing; Llama 2 fails in following the instructions of translation
- The quantitative evaluation on [LLaVA-Bench](https://github.com/haotian-liu/LLaVA/blob/main/docs/LLaVA_Bench.md) demonstrates on-par performance between Llama 2 and Llama 1 in LLaVA's multimodal chat ability.


<img src="../images/llava_example_cmp.png" width="100%">

