# PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06794 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/

## Key facts

- Cited by 766 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 112 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 766)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14525/) (2023)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05442/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14108/) (2023)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [mPLUG-Owl2: Revolutionizing Multi-modal Large Language Model with Modality Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04257/) (2023)
- [Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14045/) (2023)
- [SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01844/) (2025)
- [Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07704/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17400/) (2023)
- [RLHF-V: Towards Trustworthy MLLMs via Behavior Alignment from Fine-grained Correctional Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00849/) (2023)
- [Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Practice: A Survey on ChatGPT and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13712/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective scaling and a flexible task interface enable large language models to excel at many tasks. We present PaLI (Pathways Language and Image model), a model that extends this approach to the joint modeling of language and vision. PaLI generates text based on visual and textual inputs, and with this interface performs many vision, language, and multimodal tasks, in many languages. To train PaLI, we make use of large pre-trained encoder-decoder language models and Vision Transformers (ViTs). This allows us to capitalize on their existing capabilities and leverage the substantial cost of training them. We find that joint scaling of the vision and language components is important. Since existing Transformers for language are much larger than their vision counterparts, we train a large, 4-billion parameter ViT (ViT-e) to quantify the benefits from even larger-capacity vision models. To train PaLI, we create a large multilingual mix of pretraining tasks, based on a new image-text training set containing 10B images and texts in over 100 languages. PaLI achieves state-of-the-art in multiple vision and language tasks (such as captioning, visual question-answering, scene-text understanding), while retaining a simple, modular, and scalable design.