Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

Technique in neural networks for learning joint representations of text and images
CLIP
Developer(s)OpenAI
Initial releaseJanuary 5, 2021
Repositoryhttps://github.com/OpenAI/CLIP
Written inPython
LicenseMIT License
Websiteopenai.com/research/clip

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is a technique for training a pair of neural network models, one for image understanding and one for text understanding, using a contrastive objective.[1]

Publication history

It was first announced on OpenAI's official blog on January 5, 2021,[2] with a report served directly through OpenAI's CDN,[3] and a GitHub repository.[4] The paper was delivered on arXiv on 26 February 2021.[5]

The report (with its appendix cut out to a "Supplementary PDF") was published in Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR,[1] which had a submission deadline of February 2021.[6]

Concurrent to CLIP was ALIGN, published at the same conference. It was done by researchers at Google, with essentially the same algorithm.[7]

Algorithm

Architecture overview of CLIP.

The CLIP method trains a pair of models contrastively.[1] One model takes in a piece of text as input and outputs a single vector representing its semantic content. The other model takes in an image and similarly outputs a single vector representing its visual content. The models are trained so that the vectors corresponding to semantically similar text-image pairs are close together in the shared vector space, while those corresponding to dissimilar pairs are far apart.

To train a pair of CLIP models, one would start by preparing a large dataset of image-caption pairs. During training, the models are presented with batches of N {\displaystyle N} image-caption pairs. Let the outputs from the text and image models be respectively v 1 , . . . , v N , w 1 , . . . , w N {\displaystyle v_{1},...,v_{N},w_{1},...,w_{N}} . Two vectors are considered "similar" if their dot product is large.

The loss incurred on this batch is the multi-class N-pair loss,[8] which is a symmetric cross-entropy loss over similarity scores: − 1 N ∑ i ln ⁡ e v i ⋅ w i / T ∑ j e v i ⋅ w j / T − 1 N ∑ j ln ⁡ e v j ⋅ w j / T ∑ i e v i ⋅ w j / T {\displaystyle -{\frac {1}{N}}\sum _{i}\ln {\frac {e^{v_{i}\cdot w_{i}/T}}{\sum _{j}e^{v_{i}\cdot w_{j}/T}}}-{\frac {1}{N}}\sum _{j}\ln {\frac {e^{v_{j}\cdot w_{j}/T}}{\sum _{i}e^{v_{i}\cdot w_{j}/T}}}} In essence, this loss function encourages the dot product between matching image and text vectors ( v i ⋅ w i {\displaystyle v_{i}\cdot w_{i}} ) to be high, while discouraging high dot products between non-matching pairs. The parameter T > 0 {\displaystyle T>0} is the temperature, which is parameterized in the original CLIP model as T = e − τ {\displaystyle T=e^{-\tau }} where τ ∈ R {\displaystyle \tau \in \mathbb {R} } is a learned parameter.

Other loss functions are possible. For example, Sigmoid CLIP[9] proposes the following loss function: L = 1 N ∑ i , j ∈ 1 : N f ( ( 2 δ i , j − 1 ) ( e τ w i ⋅ v j + b ) ) {\displaystyle L={\frac {1}{N}}\sum _{i,j\in 1:N}f((2\delta _{i,j}-1)(e^{\tau }w_{i}\cdot v_{j}+b))} where f ( x ) = ln ⁡ ( 1 + e − x ) {\displaystyle f(x)=\ln(1+e^{-x})} is the negative log sigmoid loss.

CLIP models

While the original model was developed by OpenAI, subsequent models have been trained by other organizations as well.

Image model

Vision Transformer architecture. The Rep<CLS> output vector is used as the image encoding for CLIP.

The image encoding models used in CLIP are typically vision transformers (ViT). The naming convention for these models often reflects the specific ViT architecture used. For instance, "ViT-L/14" means a "vision transformer large" (compared to other models in the same series) with a patch size of 14, meaning that the image is divided into 14-by-14 pixel patches before being processed by the transformer. The size indicator ranges from B, L, H, G (base, large, huge, giant), in that order.

Other than ViT, the image model is typically a convolutional neural network, such as ResNet (in the original report), and ConvNeXt[10] (in the OpenCLIP model series[11]).

Since the output vectors of the image model and the text model must have exactly the same length, both the image model and the text model have fixed-length vector outputs, which in the original report is called "embedding dimension".[note 1]

For example, in the original OpenAI model, the ResNet models have embedding dimensions ranging from 512 to 1024.[5]: Table 19  The ViTs, ranging from 512 to 768.[5]: Table 20 

Models released by OpenAI[12][note 2]
Model name Parameters (total, in millions) Parameters (vision) Parameters (text) Embedding dimension Size (MB)
RN50 102 38.3 63.1 1024 244
RN101 120 56.3 63.1 512 278
RN50x4 178 87.1 90.7 640 402
RN50x16 291 167.3 123.0 768 630
RN50x64 623 420.4 201.8 1024 1260
ViT-B/32 151 87.8 63.1 512 338
ViT-B/16 150 86.2 63.1 512 335
ViT-L/14 428 304.0 123.0 768 890
ViT-L/14@336px 428 304.3 123.0 768 891

Its implementation of ViT was the same as the original one,[13] with one modification: after position embeddings are added to the initial patch embeddings, there is a LayerNorm.

Its implementation of ResNet was the same as the original one,[14] with 3 modifications:

  • In the start of the CNN (the "stem"), they used three stacked 3x3 convolutions instead of a single 7x7 convolution, as suggested by [15].
  • There is an average pooling of stride 2 at the start of each downsampling convolutional layer (they called it rect-2 blur pooling according to the terminology of [16]). This has the effect of blurring images before downsampling, for antialiasing.[17]
  • The final convolutional layer is followed by a multiheaded attention pooling.

ALIGN[7] used EfficientNet[18] of various sizes, a kind of convolutional neural network.

Text model

One decoder layer. The Transformer used in the CLIP text encoder was made by removing the cross-attention module, then stacking the resulting module 12 times.

The text encoding models used in CLIP are typically Transformers.

In the original OpenAI report, they reported using a Transformer (63M-parameter, 12-layer, 512-wide, 8 attention heads) with lower-cased byte pair encoding (BPE) with 49152 vocabulary size. Context length was capped at 76 for efficiency. Like GPT, it was decoder-only, with only causally-masked self-attention.[1]: 5  Its architecture is the same as GPT-2.[19]

Like BERT, the text sequence is bracketed by two special tokens [SOS] and [EOS] ("start of sequence" and "end of sequence"). Take the activations of the highest layer of the transformer on the [EOS], apply LayerNorm, then a final linear map. This is the text encoding of the input sequence. The final linear map has output dimension equal to the embedding dimension of whatever image encoder it is paired with.

ALIGN[7] used BERT of various sizes.

Dataset

WebImageText

The CLIP models released by OpenAI were trained on a dataset called "WebImageText" (WIT) containing 400 million pairs of images and their corresponding captions scraped from the internet. The total number of words in this dataset is similar in scale to the WebText dataset used for training GPT-2, which contains about 40 gigabytes of text data.[1]

The dataset contains 500,000 text-queries, with up to 20,000 (image, text) pairs per query. The text-queries were generated by starting with all words occurring at least 100 times in English Wikipedia, then extended by bigrams with high mutual information, names of all Wikipedia articles above a certain search volume, and WordNet synsets.

The dataset is private and has not been released to the public, and there is no further information on it.[note 3]

Others

ALIGN[7] used over one billion image-text pairs, obtained by extracting images and their alt-tags from online crawling. The method was described as similar to how the Conceptual Captions dataset[21] was constructed, but instead of complex filtering, they only applied a frequency-based filtering.

Later models trained by other organizations had published datasets. For example, LAION trained OpenCLIP with published datasets LAION-400M, LAION-2B, and DataComp-1B.[22][11]

Training

In the original OpenAI CLIP report, they reported training 5 ResNet and 3 ViT (ViT-B/32, ViT-B/16, ViT-L/14). Each was trained for 32 epochs. The largest ResNet model took 18 days to train on 592 V100 GPUs. The largest ViT model took 12 days on 256 V100 GPUs.

All ViT models were trained on 224x224 image resolution. The ViT-L/14 was then boosted to 336x336 resolution by FixRes,[23] resulting in a model.[note 4] They found this was the best-performing model.[1]: Appendix F. Model Hyperparameters 

In the OpenCLIP series, the ViT-L/14 model was trained on 384 A100 GPUs on the LAION-2B dataset, for 160 epochs for a total of 32B samples seen.[24]

Applications

CLIP has found wide applications in various domains.

  • A trained image encoder of a CLIP pair can be used as a pre-trained image featurizer. This can then be fed into other AI models.[1]
  • For text-to-image generation, Stable Diffusion uses the text encoder of CLIP ViT-L/14 to transform text prompts to an embedding space, as these embeddings provide detailed semantic information.[25] CLIP can also be used as a gradient signal for directly guiding diffusion ("CLIP guidance")[26][27] or other generative art.[28]
  • A finetuned model based on CLIP can be used to rank images for their aesthetic quality, which can be used for improving dataset quality.[29]
  • CLIP can retrieve for images based on textual descriptions. This is possible even if the images were not explicitly tagged with those keywords.[30][31]
  • Given an image, CLIP can generate captions.[32] This is done by finding the text input that maximizes the similarity score with the image embedding.
  • CLIP can perform zero-shot image classification tasks, i.e. without any explicit training on those specific classes.[1] This is achieved by prompting the text encoder with class names and selecting the class whose embedding is closest to the image embedding.

Multimodality

CLIP has been used as a component in multimodal learning.

For example, during the training of Google DeepMind's Flamingo (2022),[33] the authors trained a CLIP pair, with BERT as the text encoder and NormalizerFree ResNet F6[34] as the image encoder. The image encoder of the CLIP pair was taken with parameters frozen and the text encoder was discarded. The frozen image encoder was then combined with a frozen Chinchilla language model, by finetuning with some further parameters that connect the two frozen models.

Notes

  1. ^ Similar to the "embedding dimension" of text embedding in Transformer models.
  2. ^ 
    !pip install git+https://github.com/openai/CLIP.git
!wget "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openai/CLIP/main/CLIP.png" -O CLIP.png

import torch
import clip
from PIL import Image

device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"

for m in clip.available_models():
    model, preprocess = clip.load(m, device=device)
    n_params_vision = sum(p.numel() for p in model.visual.parameters())
    n_params_text = sum(p.numel() for p in model.transformer.parameters())
    n_params_text += sum(p.numel() for p in model.token_embedding.parameters())
    n_params_text += sum(p.numel() for p in model.ln_final.parameters())
    image = preprocess(Image.open("CLIP.png")).unsqueeze(0).to(device)
    image_features = model.encode_image(image)
    print(f"Model: {m}, #vision parameters: {n_params_vision:,}, #text parameters: {n_params_text:,}, embedding dimension: {image_features.shape[1]}")
    del model, preprocess, image, image_features
  3. ^ It is not the same as the Wikipedia-based Image Text dataset, also called "WIT".[20]
  4. ^ They referred to this as both ViT-L/14-336px and ViT-L/14@336px, inconsistently throughout the report.

References

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  2. ^ "Clip: Connecting text and images". OpenAI. January 5, 2021.
  3. ^ https://web.archive.org/web/20210105204011/https://cdn.openai.com/papers/Learning_Transferable_Visual_Models_From_Natural_Language.pdf
  4. ^ "initial commit · openai/CLIP@b1c4b6b". GitHub. 5 January 2021. Archived from the original on 9 Feb 2021. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
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  • OpenAI's CLIP webpage
  • Arora, Aman (2023-03-11). "The Annotated CLIP (Part-2)". amaarora.github.io. Retrieved 2024-09-11.