DLIP: Distilling Language-Image Pre-training
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning
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Abstract (arXiv)
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) shows remarkable progress with the assistance of extremely heavy parameters, which challenges deployment in real applications. Knowledge distillation is well recognized as the essential procedure in model compression. However, existing knowledge distillation techniques lack an in-depth investigation and analysis of VLP, and practical guidelines for VLP-oriented distillation are still not yet explored. In this paper, we present DLIP, a simple yet efficient Distilling Language-Image Pre-training framework, through which we investigate how to distill a light VLP model. Specifically, we dissect the model distillation from multiple dimensions, such as the architecture characteristics of different modules and the information transfer of different modalities. We conduct comprehensive experiments and provide insights on distilling a light but performant VLP model. Experimental results reveal that DLIP can achieve a state-of-the-art accuracy/efficiency trade-off across diverse cross-modal tasks, e.g., image-text retrieval, image captioning and visual question answering. For example, DLIP compresses BLIP by 1.9x, from 213M to 108M parameters, while achieving comparable or better performance. Furthermore, DLIP succeeds in retaining more than 95% of the performance with 22.4% parameters and 24.8% FLOPs compared to the teacher model and accelerates inference speed by 2.7x.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 51 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2023.
Builds on
51 of 58 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2022BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation28 Jan
- 2021SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision24 Aug
Other references · 49
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 2; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.
5 papers.
- 2023MobileCLIP: Fast Image-Text Models through Multi-Modal Reinforced Trainingcited by 96
- 2025MobileCLIP2: Improving Multi-Modal Reinforced Trainingcited by 21
- 2024MAGIC: Meta-Ability Guided Interactive Chain-of-Distillation for Effective-and-Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 6
- 2024Zoom-shot: Fast and Efficient Unsupervised Zero-Shot Transfer of CLIP to Vision Encoders with Multimodal Losscited by 3
- 2026PVCap: Towards Accurate 3D Dense Captioning via PseudoCap and VoxelCapNetcited by 0
- 2026PVCap: Towards Accurate 3D Dense Captioning via PseudoCap and VoxelCapNet7 Jul 2026
- 2025MobileCLIP2: Improving Multi-Modal Reinforced Training28 Aug 2025
- 2024MAGIC: Meta-Ability Guided Interactive Chain-of-Distillation for Effective-and-Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation25 Jun 2024
- 2024Zoom-shot: Fast and Efficient Unsupervised Zero-Shot Transfer of CLIP to Vision Encoders with Multimodal Loss22 Jan 2024
- 2023MobileCLIP: Fast Image-Text Models through Multi-Modal Reinforced Training28 Nov 2023
Similar, not cited
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- 2021KD-VLP: Improving End-to-End Vision-and-Language Pretraining with Object Knowledge Distillation
- 2022Enabling Multimodal Generation on CLIP via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation
- 2022CLIP-TD: CLIP Targeted Distillation for Vision-Language Tasks
- 2022Compressing And Debiasing Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models for Visual Question Answering
- 2026GoldiCLIP: The Goldilocks Approach for Balancing Explicit Supervision for Language-Image Pretraining
- 2025When Better Teachers Don't Make Better Students: Revisiting Knowledge Distillation for CLIP Models in VQA