Visual Question Answering with Multimodal Models

Multimodal vision models, such as PaliGemma developed by Google in 2024, enable Visual Question Answering (VQA) by analyzing images to provide answers about their contents. These models are capable of identifying and describing objects within images and their relationships to one another. PaliGemma can be used for various tasks, including website screenshot understanding and document interpretation, and can be run on personal hardware using tools like Roboflow Inference, an open-source computer vision inference server. While PaliGemma can identify objects within an image, it may not always pinpoint their exact location, necessitating additional training for object detection tasks. The process involves installing necessary software packages and using specific model weights for VQA, with the model demonstrating both its utility and limitations by answering questions about image contents.