# DisCo-CLIP: A Distributed Contrastive Loss for Memory Efficient CLIP Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08480 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08480/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [Large Batch Optimization for Deep Learning: Training BERT in 76 minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00962/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Arctic-Embed: Scalable, Efficient, and Accurate Text Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05374/) (2024)
- [CARZero: Cross-Attention Alignment for Radiology Zero-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17417/) (2024)
- [CLAP: Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining for Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04061/) (2026)
- [The Russian-focused embedders' exploration: ruMTEB benchmark and Russian embedding model design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12503/) (2024)
- [A3lign-DFER: Pioneering Comprehensive Dynamic Affective Alignment for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04294/) (2024)
- [Recurrence-Enhanced Vision-and-Language Transformers for Robust Multimodal Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01980/) (2025)
- [Taiyi-Diffusion-XL: Advancing Bilingual Text-to-Image Generation with Large Vision-Language Model Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14688/) (2024)
- [Sparse Concept Bottleneck Models: Gumbel Tricks in Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03323/) (2024)
- [FastCLIP: A Suite of Optimization Techniques to Accelerate CLIP Training with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01445/) (2024)
- [iDesigner: A High-Resolution and Complex-Prompt Following Text-to-Image Diffusion Model for Interior Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04326/) (2023)
- [Breaking the Memory Barrier: Near Infinite Batch Size Scaling for Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17243/) (2024)
- [Spurious Feature Eraser: Stabilizing Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00376/) (2024)
- [AmorLIP: Efficient Language-Image Pretraining via Amortization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18983/) (2025)
- [Breaking the Limits of Open-Weight CLIP: An Optimization Framework for Self-supervised Fine-tuning of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09859/) (2026)
- [Concrete Jungle: Towards Concreteness Paved Contrastive Negative Mining for Compositional Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13313/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose DisCo-CLIP, a distributed memory-efficient CLIP training approach, to reduce the memory consumption of contrastive loss when training contrastive learning models. Our approach decomposes the contrastive loss and its gradient computation into two parts, one to calculate the intra-GPU gradients and the other to compute the inter-GPU gradients. According to our decomposition, only the intra-GPU gradients are computed on the current GPU, while the inter-GPU gradients are collected via allreduce from other GPUs instead of being repeatedly computed on every GPU. In this way, we can reduce the GPU memory consumption of contrastive loss computation from bigO(B2) to bigO(fracB2N), where B and N are the batch size and the number of GPUs used for training. Such a distributed solution is mathematically equivalent to the original non-distributed contrastive loss computation, without sacrificing any computation accuracy. It is particularly efficient for large-batch CLIP training. For instance, DisCo-CLIP can enable contrastive training of a ViT-B/32 model with a batch size of 32K or 196K using 8 or 64 A100 40GB GPUs, compared with the original CLIP solution which requires 128 A100 40GB GPUs to train a ViT-B/32 model with a batch size of 32K. The code will be released at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DisCo-CLIP