---
license: mit
library_name: colpali
base_model: google/paligemma-3b-mix-448
language:
- en
tags:
- colpali
- vidore
- sentence-transformers
- multi-vector
new_version: vidore/colpali-v1.1
datasets:
- vidore/colpali_train_set
pipeline_tag: visual-document-retrieval
---
# ColPali: Visual Retriever based on PaliGemma-3B with ColBERT strategy

ColPali is a model based on a novel model architecture and training strategy based on Vision Language Models (VLMs) to efficiently index documents from their visual features.
It is a [PaliGemma-3B](https://huggingface.co/google/paligemma-3b-mix-448) extension that generates [ColBERT](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12832)- style multi-vector representations of text and images. 
It was introduced in the paper [ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01449) and first released in [this repository](https://github.com/ManuelFay/colpali)

<p align="center"><img width=800 src="https://github.com/illuin-tech/colpali/blob/main/assets/colpali_architecture.webp?raw=true"/></p>

## Model Description

This model is built iteratively starting from an off-the-shelf [SigLIP](https://huggingface.co/google/siglip-so400m-patch14-384) model. 
We finetuned it to create [BiSigLIP](https://huggingface.co/vidore/bisiglip) and fed the patch-embeddings output by SigLIP to an LLM, [PaliGemma-3B](https://huggingface.co/google/paligemma-3b-mix-448) to create [BiPali](https://huggingface.co/vidore/bipali). 

One benefit of inputting image patch embeddings through a language model is that they are natively mapped to a latent space similar to textual input (query). 
This enables leveraging the [ColBERT](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.12832) strategy to compute interactions between text tokens and image patches, which enables a step-change improvement in performance compared to BiPali. 

## Model Training

### Dataset
Our training dataset of 127,460 query-page pairs is comprised of train sets of openly available academic datasets (63%) and a synthetic dataset made up of pages from web-crawled PDF documents and augmented with VLM-generated (Claude-3 Sonnet) pseudo-questions (37%). 
Our training set is fully English by design, enabling us to study zero-shot generalization to non-English languages. We explicitly verify no multi-page PDF document is used both [*ViDoRe*](https://huggingface.co/collections/vidore/vidore-benchmark-667173f98e70a1c0fa4db00d) and in the train set to prevent evaluation contamination. 
A validation set is created with 2% of the samples to tune hyperparameters.

*Note: Multilingual data is present in the pretraining corpus of the language model (Gemma-2B) and potentially occurs during PaliGemma-3B's multimodal training.*

### Parameters

All models are trained for 1 epoch on the train set. Unless specified otherwise, we train models in `bfloat16` format, use low-rank adapters ([LoRA](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685)) 
with `alpha=32`  and `r=32` on the transformer layers from the language model, 
as well as the final randomly initialized projection layer, and use a `paged_adamw_8bit` optimizer. 
We train on an 8 GPU setup with data parallelism, a learning rate of 5e-5 with linear decay with 2.5% warmup steps, and a batch size of 32.

## Usage

### Using Sentence Transformers

ColPali can be used as a multi-vector (ColBERT-style late interaction) retriever directly with Sentence Transformers via the `MultiVectorEncoder`.

```bash
pip install "sentence-transformers[image]>=6.0.0"
```

```python
from sentence_transformers import MultiVectorEncoder

model = MultiVectorEncoder("vidore/colpali")

queries = [
    "What is the variable represented on the y-axis of the graph?",
    "Total outlay is maximum in which year?",
]
images = [
    "https://huggingface.co/datasets/sentence-transformers/example-documents/resolve/main/doc1.jpg",
    "https://huggingface.co/datasets/sentence-transformers/example-documents/resolve/main/doc2.jpg",
    "https://huggingface.co/datasets/sentence-transformers/example-documents/resolve/main/doc3.jpg",
    "https://huggingface.co/datasets/sentence-transformers/example-documents/resolve/main/doc4.jpg",
]

query_embeddings = model.encode_query(queries, convert_to_tensor=True)
document_embeddings = model.encode_document(images, convert_to_tensor=True)
print(f"Query 0 shape:    {tuple(query_embeddings[0].shape)}")
print(f"Document 0 shape: {tuple(document_embeddings[0].shape)}")
# Query 0 shape:    (23, 128)
# Document 0 shape: (1030, 128)

# MaxSim late-interaction scoring (rows = queries, columns = images)
scores = model.similarity(query_embeddings, document_embeddings)
print(scores)
# tensor([[17.3789, 17.1055, 15.4727, 15.4082],
#         [ 8.3750, 12.3047,  8.5898,  9.0957]])
```

### Using ColPali Engine

> [!WARNING]
> Note: current `colpali-engine` no longer sends the query prefix and trailing newline that this
> checkpoint was trained with. The trailing newline went in 0.3.11 (illuin-tech/colpali#280) and the prefix in 0.3.13 (illuin-tech/colpali#339). The Sentence Transformers
> configuration in this repository reproduces the original training-time format, so its embeddings differ
> slightly from current `colpali-engine` output.
> Release 0.3.4 had already changed the prefix from `Question: ` to `Query: ` (illuin-tech/colpali#125),
> which this checkpoint predates.
> The Sentence Transformers configuration also sends `token_type_ids` to the model, which on
> `transformers` 5.x is what makes PaliGemma build an explicit attention mask at all. Without it no
> mask is materialized and the shorter queries in a batch attend to their own padding.

> For best performance, newer models are available (vidore/colpali-v1.2)

```bash
# This model checkpoint is compatible with version 0.1.1, but not more recent versions of the inference lib
pip install colpali_engine==0.1.1
```

```python
import torch
import typer
from torch.utils.data import DataLoader
from tqdm import tqdm
from transformers import AutoProcessor
from PIL import Image

from colpali_engine.models.paligemma_colbert_architecture import ColPali
from colpali_engine.trainer.retrieval_evaluator import CustomEvaluator
from colpali_engine.utils.colpali_processing_utils import process_images, process_queries
from colpali_engine.utils.image_from_page_utils import load_from_dataset


def main() -> None:
    """Example script to run inference with ColPali"""

    # Load model
    model_name = "vidore/colpali"
    model = ColPali.from_pretrained("vidore/colpaligemma-3b-mix-448-base", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="cuda").eval()
    model.load_adapter(model_name)
    processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_name)

    # select images -> load_from_pdf(<pdf_path>),  load_from_image_urls(["<url_1>"]), load_from_dataset(<path>)
    images = load_from_dataset("vidore/docvqa_test_subsampled")
    queries = ["From which university does James V. Fiorca come ?", "Who is the japanese prime minister?"]

    # run inference - docs
    dataloader = DataLoader(
        images,
        batch_size=4,
        shuffle=False,
        collate_fn=lambda x: process_images(processor, x),
    )
    ds = []
    for batch_doc in tqdm(dataloader):
        with torch.no_grad():
            batch_doc = {k: v.to(model.device) for k, v in batch_doc.items()}
            embeddings_doc = model(**batch_doc)
        ds.extend(list(torch.unbind(embeddings_doc.to("cpu"))))

    # run inference - queries
    dataloader = DataLoader(
        queries,
        batch_size=4,
        shuffle=False,
        collate_fn=lambda x: process_queries(processor, x, Image.new("RGB", (448, 448), (255, 255, 255))),
    )

    qs = []
    for batch_query in dataloader:
        with torch.no_grad():
            batch_query = {k: v.to(model.device) for k, v in batch_query.items()}
            embeddings_query = model(**batch_query)
        qs.extend(list(torch.unbind(embeddings_query.to("cpu"))))

    # run evaluation
    retriever_evaluator = CustomEvaluator(is_multi_vector=True)
    scores = retriever_evaluator.evaluate(qs, ds)
    print(scores.argmax(axis=1))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    typer.run(main)

```

## Limitations

 - **Focus**: The model primarily focuses on PDF-type documents and high-ressources languages, potentially limiting its generalization to other document types or less represented languages.
 - **Support**: The model relies on multi-vector retreiving derived from the ColBERT late interaction mechanism, which may require engineering efforts to adapt to widely used vector retrieval frameworks that lack native multi-vector support.

## License

ColPali's vision language backbone model (PaliGemma) is under `gemma` license as specified in its [model card](https://huggingface.co/google/paligemma-3b-mix-448). The adapters attached to the model are under MIT license.

## Contact

- Manuel Faysse: manuel.faysse@illuin.tech
- Hugues Sibille: hugues.sibille@illuin.tech
- Tony Wu: tony.wu@illuin.tech

## Citation

If you use any datasets or models from this organization in your research, please cite the original dataset as follows:

```bibtex
@misc{faysse2024colpaliefficientdocumentretrieval,
  title={ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models}, 
  author={Manuel Faysse and Hugues Sibille and Tony Wu and Bilel Omrani and Gautier Viaud and Céline Hudelot and Pierre Colombo},
  year={2024},
  eprint={2407.01449},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.IR},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01449}, 
}
```