Model reference · open weights

blip-image-captioning-large

LLMs Salesforce Image→text 1 build Open weights 476k dl/mo

blip-image-captioning-large is an open-weight language model from Salesforce. blip-image-captioning-large (FP32) weighs 940 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • blip-image-captioning-large is a 470M parameter image-to-text model developed by Salesforce for conditional and unconditional image captioning.
  • It features a ViT large backbone and is pretrained on the COCO dataset.
  • The model is released under the bsd-3-clause license.

Summary of the Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-large model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bySalesforce
Released2022-12-13
Parameters470M
VRAM940 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for blip-image-captioning-large (FP32)

940 MBweights, file size
37 MBcache per 1K tokens
1.8 GBruntime overhead, at least
512 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
512 each
RTX 3060 12 GB471all 51211.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB672all 51215.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB1000+all 51223.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB1000+all 51223.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB1000+all 51231.0 GB
L40S 48 GB1000+all 51244.0 GB
A100 80 GB1000+all 51278.2 GB
H100 80 GB1000+all 51278.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB1000+all 51293.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified1000+all 512107 GB
H200 141 GB1000+all 512138 GB
B200 180 GB1000+all 512176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once512 tokens each
12.7 GB
52.8 GB
82.9 GB
163.0 GB
323.3 GB
643.9 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

From the model card

What Salesforce says about blip-image-captioning-large

Read the model card

Model card for image captioning pretrained on COCO dataset - base architecture (with ViT large backbone).

Pull figure from BLIP official repo

TL;DR

Authors from the paper write in the abstract:

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.

Usage

You can use this model for conditional and un-conditional image captioning

Using the Pytorch model

Running the model on CPU
import requests
from PIL import Image
from transformers import BlipProcessor, BlipForConditionalGeneration

processor = BlipProcessor.from_pretrained("Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-large")
model = BlipForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-large")

img_url = 'https://storage.googleapis.com/sfr-vision-language-research/BLIP/demo.jpg'
raw_image = Image.open(requests.get(img_url, stream=True).raw).convert('RGB')

# conditional image captioning
text = "a photography of"
inputs = processor(raw_image, text, return_tensors="pt")

out = model.generate(**inputs)
print(processor.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

# unconditional image captioning
inputs = processor(raw_image, return_tensors="pt")

out = model.generate(**inputs)
print(processor.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
Running the model on GPU
In full precision
import requests
from PIL import Image
from transformers import BlipProcessor, BlipForConditionalGeneration

processor = BlipProcessor.from_pretrained("Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-large")
model = BlipForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-large").to("cuda")

img_url = 'https://storage.googleapis.com/sfr-vision-language-research/BLIP/demo.jpg'
raw_image = Image.open(requests.get(img_url, stream=True).raw).convert('RGB')

# conditional image captioning
text = "a photography of"
inputs = processor(raw_image, text, return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")

out = model.generate(**inputs)
print(processor.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

# unconditional image captioning
inputs = processor(raw_image, return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")

out = model.generate(**inputs)
print(processor.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
In half precision (float16)
import torch
import requests
from PIL import Image
from transformers import BlipProcessor, BlipForConditionalGeneration

processor = BlipProcessor.from_pretrained("Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-large")
model = BlipForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-large", torch_dtype=torch.float16).to("cuda")

img_url = 'https://storage.googleapis.com/sfr-vision-language-research/BLIP/demo.jpg'
raw_image = Image.open(requests.get(img_url, stream=True).raw).convert('RGB')

# conditional image captioning
text = "a photography of"
inputs = processor(raw_image, text, return_tensors="pt").to("cuda", torch.float16)

out = model.generate(**inputs)
print(processor.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
# >>> a photography of a woman and her dog

# unconditional image captioning
inputs = processor(raw_image, return_tensors="pt").to("cuda", torch.float16)

out = model.generate(**inputs)
print(processor.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
>>> a woman sitting on the beach with her dog

Ethical Considerations

This release is for research purposes only in support of an academic paper. Our models, datasets, and code are not specifically designed or evaluated for all downstream purposes. We strongly recommend users evaluate and address potential concerns related to accuracy, safety, and fairness before deploying this model. We encourage users to consider the common limitations of AI, comply with applicable laws, and leverage best practices when selecting use cases, particularly for high-risk scenarios where errors or misuse could significantly impact people’s lives, rights, or safety. For further guidance on use cases, refer to our AUP and AI AUP.

BibTex and citation info

@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2201.12086,
  doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2201.12086},

  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12086},

  author = {Li, Junnan and Li, Dongxu and Xiong, Caiming and Hoi, Steven},

  keywords = {Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV), FOS: Computer and information sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences},

  title = {BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation},

  publisher = {arXiv},

  year = {2022},

  copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International}
}

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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