Google introduces PaliGemma 2 vision-language AI models

Google has introduced a new family of PaliGemma vision-language models, offering scalable performance, long captioning, and support for specialized tasks.

PaliGemma 2 was announced December 5, nearly seven months after the initial version launched as the first vision-language model in the Gemma family. Building on Gemma 2, PaliGemma 2 models can see, understand, and interact with visual input, according to Google.

PaliGemma 2 makes it easier for developers to add more-sophisticated vision-language features to apps, Google said. It also enables more-sophisticated captioning abilities, including identifying emotions and actions in images. Scalable performance capabilities in PaliGemma 2 mean performance can be optimized for any task via multiple model sizes (3B, 10B, 28B parameters) and resolutions (224px, 448px, 896px). Long captioning in PaliGemma 2 generates detailed, contextually relevant captions for images, going beyond simple object identification to describe actions, emotions, and the overall narrative of the scene, Google said.

PaliGemma 2 can tackle specialized tasks with state-of-the-art performance, Google said, including accurate optical character recognition and understanding the structure and content of tables in documents. Google research has shown leading performance on chemical formula recognition, music score recognition, spatial reasoning, and chest X-ray report generation, the company added.

PaliGemma 2 is designed as a drop-in replacement for the existing PaliGemma model, offering a range of model sizes with performance gains on most tasks without major code modifications, Google said. Flexibility is offered for fine-tuning of specific tasks and data sets.