Model reference · open weights
webssl-dino-heavy-224 is an open-weight embedding model from facebook. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.
Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.
What it is
| Released by | Meta |
|---|---|
| Published under | |
| Type | Embedding models |
| Task | Image embed |
| Parameters (lead) | 2.9B |
| Runs with | transformers |
| Released | 2025-04-15 |
| Popularity | 740 downloads / month |
| Licence | Commercial licence needed |
About
A 3 billion parameter Vision Transformer (ViT) trained with DINOv2 self-supervised learning on heavily filtered web-scale image data without language supervision. Introduced in "Scaling Language-Free Visual Representation Learning" (Fan et al., 2025).
Web-SSL DINO 3B is a 3 billion parameter Vision Transformer model trained using self-supervised learning on heavily filtered web images without language supervision. The "heavy2b" designation indicates training on a subset of images containing charts, tables, and documents with readable text, representing only 1.3% of the original MetaCLIP dataset. This focused filtering significantly improves OCR & Chart understanding capabilities while maintaining strong performance on other vision tasks. This model demonstrates that pure visual learning, when scaled appropriately, can match or exceed the performance of language-supervised models like CLIP across various vision tasks.
from transformers import AutoImageProcessor, Dinov2Model
import torch
from PIL import Image
processor = AutoImageProcessor.from_pretrained('facebook/webssl-dino3b-heavy2b-224')
model = Dinov2Model.from_pretrained('facebook/webssl-dino3b-heavy2b-224')
# Process an image
image = Image.open('path/to/image.jpg')
inputs = processor(images=image, return_tensors="pt")
with torch.no_grad():
outputs = model(**inputs)
cls_features = outputs.last_hidden_state[:, 0] # CLS token features
patch_features = outputs.last_hidden_state[:, 1:] # patch-wise token features
@article{fan2025scaling,
title={Scaling Language-Free Visual Representation Learning},
author={David Fan and Shengbang Tong and Jiachen Zhu and Koustuv Sinha and Zhuang Liu and Xinlei Chen and Michael Rabbat and Nicolas Ballas and Yann LeCun and Amir Bar and Saining Xie},
year={2025},
eprint={2504.01017},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV}
}
From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.
Using it via the API
Once AxForge deploys webssl-dino-heavy-224 for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (webssl-dino-heavy-224 below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)
$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"webssl-dino-heavy-224","input":"text to embed"}'
Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.