IDEFICS Visual Language Model

Description

IDEFICS (Image-aware Decoder Enhanced à la Flamingo with Interleaved Cross-attention) is an open-access visual language model developed to advance transparency and democratization in AI. It is an open reproduction of DeepMind's Flamingo, a state-of-the-art visual language model that has not been publicly released. Similar to models like GPT-4, IDEFICS can process arbitrary sequences of images and text, generating coherent text outputs.

Built exclusively on publicly available data and models, including LLaMA v1 and OpenCLIP, IDEFICS is available in two variants: a base version and an instructed version. Each variant comes in two parameter sizes: 9 billion and 80 billion. The project emphasizes transparency by using only public data, providing tools to explore training datasets, sharing technical lessons learned, and conducting internal ethical evaluations through adversarial prompting (red teaming) before release.

IDEFICS excels at tasks such as answering questions about images, describing visual content, and creating stories grounded in multiple images. Its performance is comparable to the original closed-source Flamingo model across various image-text understanding benchmarks. The model was trained on a mix of openly available datasets like Wikipedia, Public Multimodal Dataset, and LAION, along with a newly created 115B token dataset called OBELICS, which comprises 141 million interleaved image-text web documents.

The development team is committed to fostering open research in multimodal AI systems. IDEFICS aims to serve as a robust foundation for the AI community, complementing other open reproductions like OpenFlamingo. The project's ethical charter guided decisions, prioritizing self-criticism, transparency, and fairness. Users are encouraged to explore the demo, model cards, and dataset card, and provide feedback to aid in the continuous improvement of these models and the accessibility of large multimodal AI.

IDEFICS Visual Language Model Highlights

• Open-access visual language model

• Reproduces state-of-the-art capabilities

• Accepts interleaved image and text inputs

• Generates text outputs

• Comparable performance to proprietary models

• Available in 9B and 80B parameter sizes

• Base and instructed versions offered

• Trained on publicly available data and models

• Supports multimodal AI research

• Includes ethical evaluation through red teaming

• Interactive visualization of training dataset available

Getting Started with IDEFICS Visual Language Model

1. 1

   Access model: Find IDEFICS models on the Hugging Face Hub.

2. 2

   Set up environment: Ensure you have the latest transformers version installed.

3. 3

   Load model and processor: Import necessary classes and load the desired IDEFICS checkpoint.

4. 4

   Prepare inputs: Create prompts with interleaved text strings and image URLs or PIL Images.

5. 5

   Integrate via API: Use the `generate` method with prepared inputs and generation arguments.

6. 6

   Decode output: Process the generated IDs to obtain human-readable text.

7. 7

   Run inference: Execute the code to generate text based on multimodal inputs.

IDEFICS Visual Language Model's Use Cases

• Image Question Answering
• Visual Content Description
• Multimodal Storytelling
• Open Research Foundation
• AI Transparency
• Democratizing AI

FAQ from IDEFICS Visual Language Model

• What is IDEFICS?

  IDEFICS is an open-access visual language model that accepts sequences of images and text as input and generates text outputs. It is an open reproduction of DeepMind's Flamingo model.

• What are the parameter sizes for IDEFICS?

  IDEFICS is available in two parameter sizes: 9 billion and 80 billion. Both base and instructed versions are offered for each size.

• What kind of data was IDEFICS trained on?

  IDEFICS was trained on a mixture of openly available datasets including Wikipedia, Public Multimodal Dataset, LAION, and a new 115B token dataset called OBELICS.

• What are the capabilities of IDEFICS?

  IDEFICS can answer questions about images, describe visual content, and create stories grounded in multiple images, among other multimodal tasks.

• Is IDEFICS an open-source model?

  IDEFICS is an open-access reproduction. The additional weights trained by the developers are released under an MIT license, but the base models have specific licenses.

• How does IDEFICS compare to proprietary models?

  IDEFICS is comparable in performance to state-of-the-art closed-source models like Flamingo across various image-text understanding benchmarks.

• What is the OBELICS dataset?

  OBELICS is a new 115B token dataset created for IDEFICS, consisting of 141 million interleaved image-text documents scraped from the web.

• How can I try out IDEFICS?

  You can try out IDEFICS using the provided demo and models on the Hugging Face Hub. Code samples are also available for integration.

• What is the goal of releasing IDEFICS?

  The goal is to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science, providing the AI community with systems that match proprietary model capabilities.

• Are there different versions of IDEFICS?

  Yes, IDEFICS comes in a base version and an instructed version, adapted for conversational use cases. Both are available in 9B and 80B parameter sizes.