TULIP: Towards Unified Language-Image Pretraining
Authors: name: Zineng Tang; name: Long Lian; name: Seun Eisape; name: XuDong Wang; name: Roei Herzig; name: Adam Yala; name: Alane Suhr; name: Trevor Darrell; name: David M. Chan
Published: 2025-03-19 17:58:57

Abstract: Despite the recent success of image-text contrastive models like CLIP and
SigLIP, these models often struggle with vision-centric tasks that demand
high-fidelity image understanding, such as counting, depth estimation, and
fine-grained object recognition. These models, by performing language
alignment, tend to prioritize high-level semantics over visual understanding,
weakening their image understanding. On the other hand, vision-focused models
are great at processing visual information but struggle to understand language,
limiting their flexibility for language-driven tasks. In this work, we
introduce TULIP, an open-source, drop-in replacement for existing CLIP-like
models. Our method leverages generative data augmentation, enhanced image-image
and text-text contrastive learning, and image/text reconstruction
regularization to learn fine-grained visual features while preserving global
semantic alignment. Our approach, scaling to over 1B parameters, outperforms
existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across multiple benchmarks,
establishing a new SOTA zero-shot performance on ImageNet-1K, delivering up to
a 2times enhancement over SigLIP on RxRx1 in linear probing for few-shot
classification, and improving vision-language models, achieving over 3times
higher scores than SigLIP on MMVP. Our code/checkpoints are available at
https://tulip-berkeley.github.io