
BLIP
Overview
The BLIP model was proposed in BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation by Junnan Li, Dongxu Li, Caiming Xiong, Steven Hoi.
BLIP is a model that is able to perform various multi-modal tasks including:
- Visual Question Answering 
- Image-Text retrieval (Image-text matching)
- Image Captioning
The abstract from the paper is the following:
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has advanced the performance for many vision-language tasks. 
However, most existing pre-trained models only excel in either understanding-based tasks or generation-based tasks. Furthermore, performance improvement has been largely achieved by scaling up the dataset with noisy image-text pairs collected from the web, which is a suboptimal source of supervision. In this paper, we propose BLIP, a new VLP framework which transfers flexibly to both vision-language understanding and generation tasks. BLIP effectively utilizes the noisy web data by bootstrapping the captions, where a captioner generates synthetic captions and a filter removes the noisy ones. We achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language tasks, such as image-text retrieval (+2.7% in average recall@1), image captioning (+2.8% in CIDEr), and VQA (+1.6% in VQA score). BLIP also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to videolanguage tasks in a zero-shot manner. Code, models, and datasets are released.