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 extension that generates ColBERT- style multi-vector representations of text and images. It was introduced in the paper ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models and first released in this repository

Version specificity

This version is trained with colpali-engine==0.2.0 but can be loaded for any version >=0.2.0.

Compared to vidore/colpali, this version is trained with right padding for queries to fix unwanted tokens in the query encoding. It also stems from the fixed vidore/colpaligemma-3b-pt-448-base to guarantee deterministic projection layer initialization. It was trained for 5 epochs, with in-batch negatives and hard mined negatives and a warmup of 1000 steps (10x longer) to help reduce non-english language collapse.

Data is the same as the ColPali data described in the paper.

Model Description

This model is built iteratively starting from an off-the-shelf SigLIP model. We finetuned it to create BiSigLIP and fed the patch-embeddings output by SigLIP to an LLM, PaliGemma-3B to create 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 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 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) 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 with Sentence Transformers via the MultiVectorEncoder:

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

python

from sentence_transformers import MultiVectorEncoder

model = MultiVectorEncoder("vidore/colpali-v1.3")

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)
document_embeddings = model.encode_document(images)
print(f"Query 0 shape:    {tuple(query_embeddings[0].shape)}")
print(f"Document 0 shape: {tuple(document_embeddings[0].shape)}")
# Query 0 shape:    (28, 128)
# Document 0 shape: (1030, 128)

# MaxSim late-interaction scoring (rows = queries, columns = images)
scores = model.similarity(query_embeddings, document_embeddings)
print(scores)
# tensor([[22.3320, 19.8926, 19.6523, 19.1133],
#         [ 5.8750, 13.3262,  6.1465,  6.8198]])

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.

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.

Install colpali-engine:

pip install colpali-engine>=0.3.0,<0.4.0

Then run the following code:

python

from typing import cast

import torch
from PIL import Image

from colpali_engine.models import ColPali, ColPaliProcessor

model_name = "vidore/colpali-v1.3"

model = ColPali.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="cuda:0",  # or "mps" if on Apple Silicon
).eval()

processor = ColPaliProcessor.from_pretrained(model_name)

# Your inputs
images = [
    Image.new("RGB", (32, 32), color="white"),
    Image.new("RGB", (16, 16), color="black"),
]
queries = [
    "Is attention really all you need?",
    "Are Benjamin, Antoine, Merve, and Jo best friends?",
]

# Process the inputs
batch_images = processor.process_images(images).to(model.device)
batch_queries = processor.process_queries(queries).to(model.device)

# Forward pass
with torch.no_grad():
    image_embeddings = model(**batch_images)
    query_embeddings = model(**batch_queries)

scores = processor.score_multi_vector(query_embeddings, image_embeddings)

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. 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}, 
}