ColPali
Vision-language document retriever that indexes pages as images, no OCR needed.
About
ColPali, from ILLUIN Technology with CentraleSupélec and ETH Zurich collaborators, retrieves documents by analyzing their visual features instead of extracted text. It treats each document page as an image, using a PaliGemma-3B backbone to produce ColBERT-style multi-vector embeddings that capture text, layout, tables, and charts — so retrieval works directly on page screenshots with no OCR pipeline.
Released in June 2024 and later added to Hugging Face Transformers, it became a reference design for visual RAG systems and spawned follow-ups like ColQwen. Confirm the license on the illuin-tech/colpali repository before commercial use.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Reference design for visual RAG; in HF Transformers; widely forked (ColQwen).; Based on PaliGemma-3B; inherits its terms for derived checkpoints.. License: Open-sourced; confirm license on the illuin-tech/colpali repo before commercial use..
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 8.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Reference design for visual RAG; in HF Transformers; widely forked (ColQwen).
- · Based on PaliGemma-3B; inherits its terms for derived checkpoints.