MobileCLIP: Fast Image-Text Models through Multi-Modal Reinforced Training
Authors: Pavan Kumar Anasosalu Vasu, Hadi Pouransari, Fartash Faghri, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Oncel Tuzel

Contrastive pre-training of image-text foundation models such as CLIP demonstrated excellent zero-shot performance and improved robustness on a wide range of downstream tasks. However these models utilize large transformer-based encoders with significant memory and latency overhead which pose challenges for deployment on mobile devices. In this work we introduce MobileCLIP - a new family of efficient image-text models optimized for runtime performance along with a novel and efficient training approach namely multi-modal reinforced training. The proposed training approach leverages knowledge transfer from an image captioning model and an ensemble of strong CLIP encoders to improve the accuracy of efficient models. Our approach avoids train-time compute overhead by storing the additional knowledge in a reinforced dataset. MobileCLIP sets a new state-of-the-art latency-accuracy tradeoff for zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks on several datasets. Our MobileCLIP-S2 variant is 2.3x faster while more accurate compared to previous best CLIP model based on ViT-B/16. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our multi-modal reinforced training by training a CLIP model based on ViT-B/16 image backbone and achieving +2.9% average performance improvement on 38 evaluation benchmarks compared to the previous best. Moreover we show that the proposed approach achieves 10x-1000x improved learning efficiency when compared with non- reinforced CLIP training. Code and models are available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mobileclip