Scaling Pre-training to One Hundred Billion Data for Vision Language
  Models
Authors: name: Xiao Wang; name: Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin; name: Daniel Salz; name: Zhe Li; name: Keran Rong; name: Xiaohua Zhai
Published: 2025-02-11 15:05:33

Abstract: We provide an empirical investigation of the potential of pre-training
vision-language models on an unprecedented scale: 100 billion examples. We find
that model performance tends to saturate at this scale on many common
Western-centric classification and retrieval benchmarks, such as COCO Captions.
Nevertheless, tasks of cultural diversity achieve more substantial gains from
the 100-billion scale web data, thanks to its coverage of long-tail concepts.
Furthermore, we analyze the model's multilinguality and show gains in
low-resource languages as well. In addition, we observe that reducing the size
of the pretraining dataset via quality filters like using CLIP, typically used
to enhance performance, may inadvertently reduce the cultural diversity
represented even in large-scale datasets. Our results highlight that while
traditional benchmarks may not benefit significantly from scaling noisy, raw
web data to 100 billion examples, this data scale is vital for building truly
inclusive multimodal systems.