Back to the Barn with LLAMAs: Evolving Pretrained LLM Backbones in Finetuning Vision Language Models

arXiv:2604.10985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have rapidly advanced by leveraging powerful pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) as core reasoning backbones. As new and more capable LLMs emerge with improved reasoning, instruction-following, and generalization, there is a pressing need to efficiently update existing VLMs to incorporate these advancements. However, the integration of new LLMs into VLMs, particularly how the evolving LLMs contribute to multimodal