README.md

---
language: en
license: mit
tags:
- vision
- image-to-text
- image-captioning
pipeline_tag: image-to-text
---

# BLIP-2, Flan T5-xl, fine-tuned on COCO

BLIP-2 model, leveraging [Flan T5-xl](https://huggingface.co/google/flan-t5-xl) (a large language model).
It was introduced in the paper [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12597) by Li et al. and first released in [this repository](https://github.com/salesforce/LAVIS/tree/main/projects/blip2).

Disclaimer: The team releasing BLIP-2 did not write a model card for this model so this model card has been written by the Hugging Face team.

## Model description

BLIP-2 consists of 3 models: a CLIP-like image encoder, a Querying Transformer (Q-Former) and a large language model.

The authors initialize the weights of the image encoder and large language model from pre-trained checkpoints and keep them frozen
while training the Querying Transformer, which is a BERT-like Transformer encoder that maps a set of "query tokens" to query embeddings,
which bridge the gap between the embedding space of the image encoder and the large language model.

The goal for the model is simply to predict the next text token, giving the query embeddings and the previous text.

<img src="https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/transformers/model_doc/blip2_architecture.jpg"
alt="drawing" width="600"/> 

This allows the model to be used for tasks like:

- image captioning
- visual question answering (VQA)
- chat-like conversations by feeding the image and the previous conversation as prompt to the model

## Intended uses & limitations

You can use the raw model for conditional text generation given an image and optional text. See the [model hub](https://huggingface.co/models?search=Salesforce/blip) to look for
fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.

### How to use

For code examples, we refer to the [documentation](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main/en/model_doc/blip-2#transformers.Blip2ForConditionalGeneration.forward.example).