FLAIR: VLM with Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations

Rui Xiao, Sanghwan Kim, Mariana-Iuliana Georgescu, Zeynep Akata, Stephan Alaniz; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 24884-24894

CLIP has shown impressive results in aligning images and text at scale. However, its ability to capture detailed visual features remains limited because CLIP matches images and texts at a global level. To address this issue, we propose FLAIR, Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations, an approach that utilizes long and detailed image descriptions to learn localized image embeddings. By sampling diverse sub-captions that describe fine-grained details about an image, we train our vision-language model to produce not only global embeddings but also text-specific image representations. Our model introduces text-conditioned attention pooling on top of local image tokens to produce fine-grained image representations that excel at retrieving detailed image content. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on both, existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks, as well as, our newly introduced fine-grained retrieval task which evaluates vision-language models' ability to retrieve partial image content. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FLAIR trained on 30M image-text pairs in capturing fine-grained visual information, including zero-shot semantic segmentation, outperforming models trained on billions of pairs. Code is available at: https://github.com/ExplainableML/flair.