Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision

TL;DR

Florence is a versatile computer vision foundation model trained on large-scale web data, capable of generalizing across diverse tasks and modalities, achieving state-of-the-art results in numerous benchmarks.

Contribution

Introducing Florence, a new vision foundation model that expands representations across multiple levels and modalities, and demonstrates superior transfer learning and benchmark performance.

Findings

Achieves 83.74% top-1 accuracy in ImageNet-1K zero-shot classification.

Attains 62.4 mAP on COCO object detection.

Reaches 87.8% accuracy on Kinetics-600 action recognition.

Abstract

Automated visual understanding of our diverse and open world demands computer vision models to generalize well with minimal customization for specific tasks, similar to human vision. Computer vision foundation models, which are trained on diverse, large-scale dataset and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks, are critical for this mission to solve real-world computer vision applications. While existing vision foundation models such as CLIP, ALIGN, and Wu Dao 2.0 focus mainly on mapping images and textual representations to a cross-modal shared representation, we introduce a new computer vision foundation model, Florence, to expand the representations from coarse (scene) to fine (object), from static (images) to dynamic (videos), and from RGB to multiple modalities (caption, depth). By incorporating universal visual-language representations from Web-scale image-text data, our Florence model can be easily adapted for various computer vision tasks, such as classification, retrieval, object detection, VQA, image caption, video retrieval and action recognition. Moreover, Florence demonstrates outstanding performance in many types of transfer learning: fully sampled fine-tuning, linear probing, few-shot transfer and zero-shot transfer for novel images and objects. All of these properties are critical for our vision foundation model to serve general purpose vision tasks. Florence achieves new state-of-the-art results in majority of 44 representative benchmarks, e.g., ImageNet-1K zero-shot classification with top-1 accuracy of 83.74 and the top-5 accuracy of 97.18, 62.4 mAP on COCO fine tuning, 80.36 on VQA, and 87.8 on Kinetics-600.