🧠 From CLIP to the Future: A Deep Dive into Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks

Author(s): Nehdiii

Originally published on Towards AI.

From recognizing faces in photos to detecting objects in real-time videos, computer vision has revolutionized the way machines “see” the world. Tasks like image classification, object detection, segmentation, and even person re-identification (ReID) have seen massive progress thanks to deep learning.

But these advances came with a cost:

Massive datasets need to be collected and annotated.Training models from scratch takes a lot of time and compute.Task-specific fine-tuning limits generalization.

To overcome these hurdles, researchers introduced a new paradigm: Pre-train a model on large-scale data → Fine-tune it for specific tasks.

While this helped, it still relied heavily on labeled data for each task.

Then came a shift sparked by advances in natural language processing (NLP). What if we could train models on image-text pairs and let them generalize across tasks with no fine-tuning at all?

Different Learning Paradigms

Inspired by language models like BERT and GPT, a new class of models emerged: Vision-Language Models (VLMs).

These models are trained on large datasets of image-text pairs. And instead of task-specific tuning, they aim to understand the alignment between visual and textual modalities.

The result? A single model that can:

Classify images without training on any labels (zero-shot classification),Retrieve images based on text,Understand complex visual semantics.

One VLM made headlines in 2021: CLIP… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI