Recently, promising progress has been made by open-source vision-language models (VLMs) in bringing their capabilities closer to those of proprietary frontier models. However, most open-source models only publish their final model weights, leaving the critical details of data strategies and implementation largely opaque. In this work, we address VLM post-training from a data-centric perspective, showing the key role of data strategy in developing frontier VLMs. By studying and building our post-training data strategy from scratch, we share detailed insights into the development processes, aiming to benefit the development of competitive models for the open-source community. Our introduced data strategy, together with training recipes and model design, leads to a family of performant VLMs named Eagle2. Specifically, Eagle2-9B achieves state-of-the-art results across various multimodal benchmarks, matching certain competitive models with up to 70B parameters.
@article{arxiv.2501.14818,
title = {Eagle 2: Building Post-Training Data Strategies from Scratch for Frontier Vision-Language Models},
author = {Zhiqi Li and Guo Chen and Shilong Liu and Shihao Wang and Vibashan VS and Yishen Ji and Shiyi Lan and Hao Zhang and Yilin Zhao and Subhashree Radhakrishnan and Nadine Chang and Karan Sapra and Amala Sanjay Deshmukh and Tuomas Rintamaki and Matthieu Le and Ilia Karmanov and Lukas Voegtle and Philipp Fischer and De-An Huang and Timo Roman and Tong Lu and Jose M. Alvarez and Bryan Catanzaro and Jan Kautz and Andrew Tao and Guilin Liu and Zhiding Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.14818},
year = {2025}
}