OpenVision: A Fully-Open, Cost-Effective Family of Advanced Vision
  Encoders for Multimodal Learning
Authors: name: Xianhang Li; name: Yanqing Liu; name: Haoqin Tu; name: Hongru Zhu; name: Cihang Xie
Published: 2025-05-07 17:48:35

Abstract: OpenAI's CLIP, released in early 2021, have long been the go-to choice of
vision encoder for building multimodal foundation models. Although recent
alternatives such as SigLIP have begun to challenge this status quo, to our
knowledge none are fully open: their training data remains proprietary and/or
their training recipes are not released. This paper fills this gap with
OpenVision, a fully-open, cost-effective family of vision encoders that match
or surpass the performance of OpenAI's CLIP when integrated into multimodal
frameworks like LLaVA. OpenVision builds on existing works -- e.g., CLIPS for
training framework and Recap-DataComp-1B for training data -- while revealing
multiple key insights in enhancing encoder quality and showcasing practical
benefits in advancing multimodal models. By releasing vision encoders spanning
from 5.9M to 632.1M parameters, OpenVision offers practitioners a flexible
trade-off between capacity and efficiency in building multimodal models: larger
models deliver enhanced multimodal performance, while smaller versions enable
lightweight, edge-ready multimodal deployments.