clip

# CLIP - Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training OpenAI's model that understands images from natural language. ## When to use CLIP **Use when:** - Zero-shot image classification (no training data needed) - Image-text similarity/matching - Semantic image search - Content moderation (detect NSFW, violence) - Visual question answering - Cross-modal retrieval (image→text, text→image) **Metrics**: - **25,300+ GitHub stars** - Trained on 400M image-text pairs - Matches ResNet-50 on ImageNet (zero-shot) - MIT License **Use alternatives instead**: - **BLIP-2**: Better captioning - **LLaVA**: Vision-language chat - **Segment Anything**: Image segmentation ## Quick start ### Installation ```bash pip install git+https://github.com/openai/CLIP.git pip install torch torchvision ftfy regex tqdm ``` ### Zero-shot classification ```python import torch import clip from PIL import Image # Load model device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu" model, preprocess = clip.load("ViT-B/32", device=device) # Load image image = preprocess(Image.open("photo.jpg")).unsqueeze(0).to(device) # Define possible labels text = clip.tokenize(["a dog", "a cat", "a bird", "a car"]).to(device) # Compute similarity with torch.no_grad(): image_features = model.encode_image(image) text_features = model.encode_text(text) # Cosine similarity logits_per_image, logits_per_text = model(image, text) probs = logits_per_image.softmax(dim=-1).cpu().numpy() # Print results labels = ["a dog", "a cat", "a bird", "a car"] for label, prob in zip(labels, probs[0]): print(f"{label}: {prob:.2%}") ``` ## Available models ```python # Models (sorted by size) models = [ "RN50", # ResNet-50 "RN101", # ResNet-101 "ViT-B/32", # Vision Transformer (recommended) "ViT-B/16", # Better quality, slower "ViT-L/14", # Best quality, slowest ] model, preprocess = clip.load("ViT-B/32") ``` | Model | Parameters | Speed | Quality | |-------|------------|-------|---------| | RN50 | 102M | Fast | Good | | ViT-B/32 | 151M | Medium | Better | | ViT-L/14 | 428M | Slow | Best | ## Image-text similarity ```python # Compute embeddings image_features = model.encode_image(image) text_features = model.encode_text(text) # Normalize image_features /= image_features.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True) text_features /= text_features.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True) # Cosine similarity similarity = (image_features @ text_features.T).item() print(f"Similarity: {similarity:.4f}") ``` ## Semantic image search ```python # Index images image_paths = ["img1.jpg", "img2.jpg", "img3.jpg"] image_embeddings = [] for img_path in image_paths: image = preprocess(Image.open(img_path)).unsqueeze(0).to(device) with torch.no_grad(): embedding = model.encode_image(image) embedding /= embedding.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True) image_embeddings.append(embedding) image_embeddings = torch.cat(image_embeddings) # Search with text query query = "a sunset over the ocean" text_input = clip.tokenize([query]).to(device) with torch.no_grad(): text_embedding = model.encode_text(text_input) text_embedding /= text_embedding.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True) # Find most similar images similarities = (text_embedding @ image_embeddings.T).squeeze(0) top_k = similarities.topk(3) for idx, score in zip(top_k.indices, top_k.values): print(f"{image_paths[idx]}: {score:.3f}") ``` ## Content moderation ```python # Define categories categories = [ "safe for work", "not safe for work", "violent content", "graphic content" ] text = clip.tokenize(categories).to(device) # Check image with torch.no_grad(): logits_per_image, _ = model(image, text) probs = logits_per_image.softmax(dim=-1) # Get classification max_idx = probs.argmax().item() max_prob = probs[0, max_idx].item() print(f"Category: {categories[max_idx]} ({max_prob:.2%})") ``` ## Batch processing ```python # Process multiple images images = [preprocess(Image.open(f"img{i}.jpg")) for i in range(10)] images = torch.stack(images).to(device) with torch.no_grad(): image_features = model.encode_image(images) image_features /= image_features.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True) # Batch text texts = ["a dog", "a cat", "a bird"] text_tokens = clip.tokenize(texts).to(device) with torch.no_grad(): text_features = model.encode_text(text_tokens) text_features /= text_features.norm(dim=-1, keepdim=True) # Similarity matrix (10 images × 3 texts) similarities = image_features @ text_features.T print(similarities.shape) # (10, 3) ``` ## Integration with vector databases ```python # Store CLIP embeddings in Chroma/FAISS import chromadb client = chromadb.Client() collection = client.create_collection("image_embeddings") # Add image embeddings for img_path, embedding in zip(image_paths, image_embeddings): collection.add( embeddings=[embedding.cpu().numpy().tolist()], metadatas=[{"path": img_path}], ids=[img_path] ) # Query with text query = "a sunset" text_embedding = model.encode_text(clip.tokenize([query])) results = collection.query( query_embeddings=[text_embedding.cpu().numpy().tolist()], n_results=5 ) ``` ## Best practices 1. **Use ViT-B/32 for most cases** - Good balance 2. **Normalize embeddings** - Required for cosine similarity 3. **Batch processing** - More efficient 4. **Cache embeddings** - Expensive to recompute 5. **Use descriptive labels** - Better zero-shot performance 6. **GPU recommended** - 10-50× faster 7. **Preprocess images** - Use provided preprocess function ## Performance | Operation | CPU | GPU (V100) | |-----------|-----|------------| | Image encoding | ~200ms | ~20ms | | Text encoding | ~50ms | ~5ms | | Similarity compute | <1ms | <1ms | ## Limitations 1. **Not for fine-grained tasks** - Best for broad categories 2. **Requires descriptive text** - Vague labels perform poorly 3. **Biased on web data** - May have dataset biases 4. **No bounding boxes** - Whole image only 5. **Limited spatial understanding** - Position/counting weak ## Resources - **GitHub**: https://github.com/openai/CLIP ⭐ 25,300+ - **Paper**: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00020 - **Colab**: https://colab.research.google.com/github/openai/clip/ - **License**: MIT --- > Converted and distributed by [TomeVault](https://tomevault.io) | [Claim this content](https://tomevault.io/claim/davila7/claude-code-templates) <!-- tomevault:2.0:skill_md:2026-04-05 -->