---
license: mit
language:
- en
- fr
tags:
- vidore
---
# ColPali: Visual Retriever based on PaliGemma-3B with ColBERT strategy
### Idefics2 version

ColIdefics is a model based on a novel model architecture and training strategy based on Vision Language Models (VLMs) to efficiently index documents from their visual features.
It is a Idefics2 extension that generates [ColBERT](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12832)- style multi-vector representations of text and images. 
It was introduced in the paper [ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01449) and first released in [this repository](https://github.com/ManuelFay/colpali)

## Model Description

This model is built iteratively starting from an off-the-shelf [SigLIP](https://huggingface.co/google/siglip-so400m-patch14-384) model. 
We finetuned it to create [BiSigLIP](https://huggingface.co/vidore/bisiglip) and fed the patch-embeddings output by SigLIP to an LLM, [PaliGemma-3B](https://huggingface.co/google/paligemma-3b-mix-448) to create [BiPali](https://huggingface.co/vidore/bipali). 

One benefit of inputting image patch embeddings through a language model is that they are natively mapped to a latent space similar to textual input (query). 
This enables leveraging the [ColBERT](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12832) strategy to compute interactions between text tokens and image patches, which enables a step-change improvement in performance compared to BiPali. 

## Model Training

### Dataset
Our training dataset of 127,460 query-page pairs is comprised of train sets of openly available academic datasets (63%) and a synthetic dataset made up of pages from web-crawled PDF documents and augmented with VLM-generated (Claude-3 Sonnet) pseudo-questions (37%). 
Our training set is fully English by design, enabling us to study zero-shot generalization to non-English languages. We explicitly verify no multi-page PDF document is used both [*ViDoRe*](https://huggingface.co/collections/vidore/vidore-benchmark-667173f98e70a1c0fa4db00d) and in the train set to prevent evaluation contamination. 
A validation set is created with 2% of the samples to tune hyperparameters.

*Note: Multilingual data is present in the pretraining corpus of the language model (Gemma-2B) and potentially occurs during PaliGemma-3B's multimodal training.*

### Parameters

All models are trained for 1 epoch on the train set. Unless specified otherwise, we train models in `bfloat16` format, use low-rank adapters ([LoRA](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685)) 
with `alpha=32`  and `r=32` on the transformer layers from the language model, 
as well as the final randomly initialized projection layer, and use a `paged_adamw_8bit` optimizer. 
We train on an 8 GPU setup with data parallelism, a learning rate of 5e-5 with linear decay with 2.5% warmup steps, and a batch size of 32.

## Usage

```python
import torch
import typer
from torch.utils.data import DataLoader
from tqdm import tqdm
from transformers import AutoProcessor
from PIL import Image

from colpali_engine.models.paligemma_colbert_architecture import ColPali
from colpali_engine.trainer.retrieval_evaluator import CustomEvaluator
from colpali_engine.utils.colpali_processing_utils import process_images, process_queries
from colpali_engine.utils.image_from_page_utils import load_from_dataset


def main() -> None:
    """Example script to run inference with ColPali"""

    # Load model
    model_name = "vidore/colpali"
    model = ColPali.from_pretrained("google/paligemma-3b-mix-448", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="cuda").eval()
    model.load_adapter(model_name)
    processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_name)

    # select images -> load_from_pdf(<pdf_path>),  load_from_image_urls(["<url_1>"]), load_from_dataset(<path>)
    images = load_from_dataset("vidore/docvqa_test_subsampled")
    queries = ["From which university does James V. Fiorca come ?", "Who is the japanese prime minister?"]

    # run inference - docs
    dataloader = DataLoader(
        images,
        batch_size=4,
        shuffle=False,
        collate_fn=lambda x: process_images(processor, x),
    )
    ds = []
    for batch_doc in tqdm(dataloader):
        with torch.no_grad():
            batch_doc = {k: v.to(model.device) for k, v in batch_doc.items()}
            embeddings_doc = model(**batch_doc)
        ds.extend(list(torch.unbind(embeddings_doc.to("cpu"))))

    # run inference - queries
    dataloader = DataLoader(
        queries,
        batch_size=4,
        shuffle=False,
        collate_fn=lambda x: process_queries(processor, x, Image.new("RGB", (448, 448), (255, 255, 255))),
    )

    qs = []
    for batch_query in dataloader:
        with torch.no_grad():
            batch_query = {k: v.to(model.device) for k, v in batch_query.items()}
            embeddings_query = model(**batch_query)
        qs.extend(list(torch.unbind(embeddings_query.to("cpu"))))

    # run evaluation
    retriever_evaluator = CustomEvaluator(is_multi_vector=True)
    scores = retriever_evaluator.evaluate(qs, ds)
    print(scores.argmax(axis=1))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    typer.run(main)

```

## Limitations

 - **Focus**: The model primarily focuses on PDF-type documents and high-ressources languages, potentially limiting its generalization to other document types or less represented languages.
 - **Support**: The model relies on multi-vector retreiving derived from the ColBERT late interaction mechanism, which may require engineering efforts to adapt to widely used vector retrieval frameworks that lack native multi-vector support.

## License

The base model behing ColIdefics (Idefics2) is under MIT license. The adapters attached to the model are under MIT license.

## Contact

- Manuel Faysse: manuel.faysse@illuin.tech
- Hugues Sibille: hugues.sibille@illuin.tech
- Tony Wu: tony.wu@illuin.tech

## Citation

If you use any datasets or models from this organization in your research, please cite the original dataset as follows:

```bibtex
    @misc{faysse2024colpaliefficientdocumentretrieval,
      title={ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models}, 
      author={Manuel Faysse and Hugues Sibille and Tony Wu and Bilel Omrani and Gautier Viaud and Céline Hudelot and Pierre Colombo},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2407.01449},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.IR},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01449}, 
}
```