Recognize Anything: A Strong Image Tagging Model

Abstract

We present the Recognize Anything Model (RAM): a strong foundation model for image tagging. RAM makes a substantial step for foundation models in computer vision, demonstrating the zero-shot ability to recognize any common category with high accuracy. By leveraging large-scale image-text pairs for training instead of manual annotations, RAM introduces a new paradigm for image tagging.The development of RAM comprises four key steps. Firstly, annotation-free image tags are obtained at scale through automatic text semantic parsing. Subsequently, a preliminary model is trained for automatic annotation by unifying the captioning and tagging tasks, supervised by the original texts and parsed tags, respectively. Thirdly, a data engine is employed to generate additional annotations and clean incorrect ones. Lastly, the model is retrained with the processed data and fine-tuned using a smaller but higher-quality dataset.We evaluate the tagging capability of RAM on numerous benchmarks and observe an impressive zero-shot performance, which significantly outperforms CLIP and BLIP. Remarkably, RAM even surpasses fully supervised models and exhibits a competitive performance compared with the Google tagging API. We have released RAM at https://recognize-anything.github.io/ to foster the advancement of foundation models in computer vision.