Model reference · open weights
BGE-VL is an open-weight embedding model from BAAI. BGE-VL-base (BF16) weighs 299 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.
Summary of the BAAI/BGE-VL-base model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | BAAI |
|---|---|
| Released | 2025-02-25 |
| Parameters | 150M |
| VRAM | 299 MB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Runs | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
From the model card
2024-3-4 🚀🚀 We have released the BGE-VL-MLLM models on Huggingface: BGE-VL-MLLM-S1 and BGE-VL-MLLM-S2. BGE-VL-MLLM-S1 is trained exclusively on our MegaPairs dataset, achieving outstanding performance in composed image retrieval, with an 8.1% improvement on the CIRCO benchmark (mAP@5) over the previous state-of-the-art. BGE-VL-MLLM-S2 builds on BGE-VL-MLLM-S1 with an additional epoch of fine-tuning on the MMEB benchmark training set, delivering enhanced performance across a broader range of multimodal embedding tasks.
2024-12-27 🚀🚀 BGE-VL-CLIP models are released on Huggingface: BGE-VL-base and BGE-VL-large.
2024-12-19 🎉🎉 Release our paper: MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis For Universal Multimodal Retrieval.
In this work, we introduce MegaPairs, a novel data synthesis method that leverages open-domain images to create heterogeneous KNN triplets for universal multimodal retrieval. Our MegaPairs dataset contains over 26 million triplets, and we have trained a series of multimodal retrieval models, BGE-VL, including BGE-VL-CLIP (base and large) and BGE-VL-MLLM.
BGE-VL achieve state-of-the-art performance on four popular zero-shot composed image retrieval benchmarks and the massive multimodal embedding benchmark (MMEB). Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and generalization features of MegaPairs. Please refer to our paper for more details.
Install Sentence Transformers:
pip install sentence_transformers[image]
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
model = SentenceTransformer("BAAI/BGE-VL-base", trust_remote_code=True)
query_image = "https://huggingface.co/BAAI/BGE-VL-base/resolve/main/assets/cir_query.png"
candidate_1 = "https://huggingface.co/BAAI/BGE-VL-base/resolve/main/assets/cir_candi_1.png"
candidate_2 = "https://huggingface.co/BAAI/BGE-VL-base/resolve/main/assets/cir_candi_2.png"
# Encode text
text_embeddings = model.encode(["A dog sitting on a bench", "A cat sleeping on a couch"])
print(text_embeddings.shape)
# (2, 512)
# Encode images
image_embeddings = model.encode([query_image, candidate_1])
print(image_embeddings.shape)
# (2, 512)
# Compute similarities
similarities = model.similarity(text_embeddings, image_embeddings)
print(similarities)
# tensor([[0.1050, 0.0871],
# [0.0010, 0.0355]])
# Composed image retrieval: encode image+text query, compare with image candidates
query_embeddings = model.encode([{
"image": query_image,
"text": "Make the background dark, as if the camera has taken the photo at night",
}])
candidate_embeddings = model.encode([candidate_1, candidate_2])
scores = model.similarity(query_embeddings, candidate_embeddings)
print(scores)
# tensor([[0.2645, 0.1251]])
You can pass string texts, images as PIL Images, local paths, URLs, or a combination of text and images (with a dictionary format) to the model's encode function. The model will automatically process the inputs and return the corresponding embeddings. You can then compute cosine similarities or perform retrieval tasks based on these embeddings.
You can easily use BGE-VL-CLIP models based on transformers
import torch
from transformers import AutoModel
MODEL_NAME = "BAAI/BGE-VL-base" # or "BAAI/BGE-VL-large"
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained(MODEL_NAME, trust_remote_code=True) # You must set trust_remote_code=True
model.set_processor(MODEL_NAME)
model.eval()
with torch.no_grad():
query = model.encode(
images = "./assets/cir_query.png",
text = "Make the background dark, as if the camera has taken the photo at night"
)
candidates = model.encode(
images = ["./assets/cir_candi_1.png", "./assets/cir_candi_2.png"]
)
scores = query @ candidates.T
print(scores)
See the demo for a complete example of using BGE-VL for multimodel retrieval.
import torch
from transformers import AutoModel
from PIL import Image
MODEL_NAME= "BAAI/BGE-VL-MLLM-S1"
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained(MODEL_NAME, trust_remote_code=True)
model.eval()
model.cuda()
with torch.no_grad():
model.set_processor(MODEL_NAME)
query_inputs = model.data_process(
text="Make the background dark, as if the camera has taken the photo at night",
images="./assets/cir_query.png",
q_or_c="q",
task_instruction="Retrieve the target image that best meets the combined criteria by using both the provided image and the image retrieval instructions: "
)
candidate_inputs = model.data_process(
images=["./assets/cir_candi_1.png", "./assets/cir_candi_2.png"],
q_or_c="c",
)
query_embs = model(**query_inputs, output_hidden_states=True)[:, -1, :]
candi_embs = model(**candidate_inputs, output_hidden_states=True)[:, -1, :]
query_embs = torch.nn.functional.normalize(query_embs, dim=-1)
candi_embs = torch.nn.functional.normalize(candi_embs, dim=-1)
scores = torch.matmul(query_embs, candi_embs.T)
print(scores)
BGE-VL sets a new performance benchmark in zero-shot composed image retrieval tasks. On the CIRCO benchmark, our BGE-VL-base model, with only 149 million parameters, surpasses all previous models, including those with 50 times more parameters. Additionally, BGE-VL-MLLM achieves an 8.1% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art model.
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.