Model reference · open weights

clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual

Embeddings sentence-transformers Embeddings 1 build Open weights 97k dl/mo

clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual is an open-weight embedding model from sentence-transformers. clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1 (FP32) weighs 269 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual is a sentence-transformers model with 135M parameters designed for sentence-similarity tasks. It maps text in over 50 languages and images to a common vector space for image search and zero-shot classification. The model uses a 512-token context length and is released under the apache-2.0 licence.

Summary of the sentence-transformers/clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bysentence-transformers
TypeEmbedding models
TaskEmbeddings
Parameters (lead)135M
Context512 tokens
Runs withsentence-transformers
Released2022-03-02
Popularity97k downloads / month
Weights269 MB (clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1 (FP32), file size)
LicenceOpen weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1 (FP32)

Weights 269 MB (file size) · overhead about 1.1 GB.

CardRunsCounted
memory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

Estimates, not measurements: the weights are the build's file size. No cache grows with use; a batch of inputs needs working memory of its own. Counted memory is 92 % of what CUDA reports for the card.

From the model card

What sentence-transformers says about clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual

Read the model card

This is a multi-lingual version of the OpenAI CLIP-ViT-B32 model. You can map text (in 50+ languages) and images to a common dense vector space such that images and the matching texts are close. This model can be used for image search (users search through a large collection of images) and for multi-lingual zero-shot image classification (image labels are defined as text).

Usage (Sentence-Transformers)

Using this model becomes easy when you have sentence-transformers installed:

pip install -U sentence-transformers

Then you can use the model like this:

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer, util
from PIL import Image, ImageFile
import requests
import torch

# We use the original clip-ViT-B-32 for encoding images
img_model = SentenceTransformer('clip-ViT-B-32')

# Our text embedding model is aligned to the img_model and maps 50+
# languages to the same vector space
text_model = SentenceTransformer('sentence-transformers/clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1')

# Now we load and encode the images
def load_image(url_or_path):
    if url_or_path.startswith("http://") or url_or_path.startswith("https://"):
        return Image.open(requests.get(url_or_path, stream=True).raw)
    else:
        return Image.open(url_or_path)

# We load 3 images. You can either pass URLs or
# a path on your disc
img_paths = [
    # Dog image
    "https://unsplash.com/photos/QtxgNsmJQSs/download?ixid=MnwxMjA3fDB8MXxhbGx8fHx8fHx8fHwxNjM1ODQ0MjY3&w=640",

    # Cat image
    "https://unsplash.com/photos/9UUoGaaHtNE/download?ixid=MnwxMjA3fDB8MXxzZWFyY2h8Mnx8Y2F0fHwwfHx8fDE2MzU4NDI1ODQ&w=640",

    # Beach image
    "https://unsplash.com/photos/Siuwr3uCir0/download?ixid=MnwxMjA3fDB8MXxzZWFyY2h8NHx8YmVhY2h8fDB8fHx8MTYzNTg0MjYzMg&w=640"
]

images = [load_image(img) for img in img_paths]

# Map images to the vector space
img_embeddings = img_model.encode(images)

# Now we encode our text:
texts = [
    "A dog in the snow",
    "Eine Katze",  # German: A cat
    "Una playa con palmeras."  # Spanish: a beach with palm trees
]

text_embeddings = text_model.encode(texts)

# Compute cosine similarities:
cos_sim = util.cos_sim(text_embeddings, img_embeddings)

for text, scores in zip(texts, cos_sim):
    max_img_idx = torch.argmax(scores)
    print("Text:", text)
    print("Score:", scores[max_img_idx] )
    print("Path:", img_paths[max_img_idx], "\n")

Multilingual Image Search - Demo

For more details on image search and zero-shot image classification, have a look at the documentation on SBERT.net.

Training

This model has been created using Multilingual Knowledge Distillation. As teacher model, we used the original clip-ViT-B-32 and then trained a multilingual DistilBERT model as student model. Using parallel data, the multilingual student model learns to align the teachers vector space across many languages. As a result, you get an text embedding model that works for 50+ languages.

The image encoder from CLIP is unchanged, i.e. you can use the original CLIP image encoder to encode images.

Have a look at the SBERT.net - Multilingual-Models documentation on more details and for training code.

We used the following 50+ languages to align the vector spaces: ar, bg, ca, cs, da, de, el, es, et, fa, fi, fr, fr-ca, gl, gu, he, hi, hr, hu, hy, id, it, ja, ka, ko, ku, lt, lv, mk, mn, mr, ms, my, nb, nl, pl, pt, pt, pt-br, ro, ru, sk, sl, sq, sr, sv, th, tr, uk, ur, vi, zh-cn, zh-tw.

The original multilingual DistilBERT supports 100+ lanugages. The model also work for these languages, but might not yield the best results.

Full Model Architecture

SentenceTransformer(
  (0): Transformer({'max_seq_length': 128, 'do_lower_case': False}) with Transformer model: DistilBertModel
  (1): Pooling({'word_embedding_dimension': 768, 'pooling_mode_cls_token': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_tokens': True, 'pooling_mode_max_tokens': False, 'pooling_mode_mean_sqrt_len_tokens': False})
  (2): Dense({'in_features': 768, 'out_features': 512, 'bias': False, 'activation_function': 'torch.nn.modules.linear.Identity'})
)

Citing & Authors

This model was trained by sentence-transformers.

If you find this model helpful, feel free to cite our publication Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks:

@inproceedings{reimers-2019-sentence-bert,
    title = "Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks",
    author = "Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = "11",
    year = "2019",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084",
}

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

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