Building models that can be rapidly adapted to novel tasks using only a handful of annotated examples is an open challenge for multimodal machine learning research. We introduce Flamingo, a family of Visual Language Models (VLM) with this ability. We propose key architectural innovations to: (i) bridge powerful pretrained vision-only and language-only models, (ii) handle sequences of arbitrarily interleaved visual and textual data, and (iii) seamlessly ingest images or videos as inputs. Thanks to their flexibility, Flamingo models can be trained on large-scale multimodal web corpora containing arbitrarily interleaved text and images, which is key to endow them with in-context few-shot learning capabilities. We perform a thorough evaluation of our models, exploring and measuring their ability to rapidly adapt to a variety of image and video tasks. These include open-ended tasks such as visual question-answering, where the model is prompted with a question which it has to answer; captioning tasks, which evaluate the ability to describe a scene or an event; and close-ended tasks such as multiple-choice visual question-answering. For tasks lying anywhere on this spectrum, a single Flamingo model can achieve a new state of the art with few-shot learning, simply by prompting the model with task-specific examples. On numerous benchmarks, Flamingo outperforms models fine-tuned on thousands of times more task-specific data.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Benchmark
Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Retrieval COCO 2014 Flamingo Image-to-text R@1 65.9 # 9
Image-to-text R@5 87.3 # 8
Image-to-text R@10 92.9 # 7
Text-to-image R@1 48.0 # 9
Text-to-image R@5 73.3 # 9
Text-to-image R@10 82.1 # 8
Zero-Shot Cross-Modal Retrieval Flickr30k Flamingo Image-to-text R@1 89.3 # 10
Image-to-text R@5 98.8 # 11
Image-to-text R@10 99.7 # 7
Text-to-image R@1 79.5 # 8
Text-to-image R@5 95.3 # 7
Text-to-image R@10 97.9 # 5
Meme Classification Hateful Memes Flamingo (few-shot:32) ROC-AUC 0.700 # 12
Meme Classification Hateful Memes Flamingo (fine-tuned) ROC-AUC 0.866 # 3
Visual Question Answering (VQA) MSRVTT-QA Flamingo (32-shot) Accuracy 0.310 # 32
Visual Question Answering (VQA) MSRVTT-QA Flamingo (0-shot) Accuracy 0.174 # 34
Visual Question Answering (VQA) MSRVTT-QA Flamingo Accuracy 0.474 # 5
Temporal/Casual QA NExT-QA Flamingo(32-shot) WUPS 33.5 # 4
Temporal/Casual QA NExT-QA Flamingo(0-shot) WUPS 26.7 # 7
Visual Question Answering (VQA) OK-VQA Flamingo80B Accuracy 50.6 # 18
Visual Question Answering (VQA) OK-VQA Flamingo9B Accuracy 44.7 # 23
Visual Question Answering (VQA) OK-VQA Flamingo3B Accuracy 41.2 # 26
Generative Visual Question Answering PMC-VQA Open-Flamingo BLEU-1 4.1 # 3
Medical Visual Question Answering PMC-VQA Open-Flamingo Accuracy 26.4 # 2
Visual Question Answering (VQA) PMC-VQA Open-Flamingo Accuracy 26.4 # 2
Action Recognition RareAct ๐Ÿฆฉ Flamingo mWAP 60.8 # 1
Video Question Answering STAR Benchmark Flamingo-9B (0-shot) Average Accuracy 41.8 # 15
Video Question Answering STAR Benchmark Flamingo-9B (4-shot) Average Accuracy 42.8 # 13
Video Question Answering STAR Benchmark Flamingo-80B (0-shot) Average Accuracy 39.7 # 16
Video Question Answering STAR Benchmark Flamingo-80B (4-shot) Average Accuracy 42.4 # 14
Zero-Shot Video Question Answer STAR Benchmark Flamingo-9B Accuracy 41.8 # 2
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VQA v2 test-dev Flamingo 80B Accuracy 56.3 # 51
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VQA v2 test-dev Flamingo 9B Accuracy 51.8 # 54
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VQA v2 test-dev Flamingo 3B Accuracy 49.2 # 57

Methods


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