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Google: PaliGemma

PaliGemma Overview

PaliGemma is a vision-language model released in May 2024 by Google, built by pairing the SigLIP-So400m vision encoder with the Gemma 2B language model. It is designed primarily as a compact, transfer-friendly base model for fine-tuning to downstream vision-language tasks, rather than as a chat-optimized assistant. PaliGemma draws architectural inspiration from the PaLI-3 model at Google Research, applying a similar encoder-decoder approach at a smaller and more accessible parameter scale.

PaliGemma accepts an image together with a text prompt and generates text output, supporting image captioning, visual question answering, optical character recognition, object detection, referring expression segmentation, and a range of related vision-language tasks when fine-tuned on task-specific data. The model is released at three input resolutions (224, 448, and 896 pixels), with higher resolutions providing stronger performance on tasks requiring fine visual detail such as OCR and document understanding. Google released pretrained (PT) checkpoints intended as fine-tuning bases, along with Mix variants that have been fine-tuned on a mixture of downstream tasks for direct use without additional training. PaliGemma is distributed under the Gemma license, a custom license from Google that permits commercial use subject to the terms of the Gemma Prohibited Use Policy. It was succeeded by PaliGemma 2 in December 2024, which extends the architecture to larger Gemma 2 language backbones at 3B, 10B, and 28B parameter sizes.

PaliGemma Details & Performance

Details

Resources

GitHubPaperColabTutorialVideo

Vision Tasks

Vision LanguageCaptioningVisual Question Answering

Features

Multimodal VisionLLMs with Vision Capabilities

Usage

Past 30 Days

Not available

Not in Playground

Performance

Avg. Latency

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Google
PaliGemma 2
PaliGemma 2 is a vision-language model released in December 2024 by Google DeepMind. It pairs the SigLIP-So400m vision encoder with the Gemma 2 language model family, extending the original PaliGemma architecture with stronger language capabilities and a wider set of transfer benchmarks. The model is designed primarily as a fine-tuning base rather than a chat-optimized assistant. Google releases pretrained "PT" checkpoints intended for task-specific adaptation rather than direct out-of-the-box use.PaliGemma 2 accepts an image paired with a text prompt and generates natural language output, supporting image captioning, visual question answering, optical character recognition, document understanding, object detection and segmentation (with appropriate fine-tuning), and a range of specialized vision-language tasks. The model is released at three parameter sizes (3B, 10B, and 28B), built on the Gemma 2 2B, 9B, and 27B language backbones. Each size is available at three input resolutions: 224, 448, and 896 pixels. Alongside the base PT checkpoints, Google released PaliGemma 2 Mix variants that have been tuned on a mixture of downstream tasks to provide stronger out-of-the-box performance for common applications such as OCR and document parsing. PaliGemma 2 is distributed under the Gemma license, a custom license from Google that permits commercial use subject to the terms of the Gemma Prohibited Use Policy.
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PaliGemma License

Custom License · Model-specific license

PaliGemma ships under a custom, model-specific license rather than a standard permissive or restrictive one, so the PaliGemma license has to be read directly. Custom model licenses range from effectively permissive to research-only.

Commercial use
Varies. Custom model licenses commonly restrict commercial use, cap monthly active users, or carve out specific industries — check the PaliGemma terms before you build on it.
Modification
Usually permitted for fine-tuning, but check whether derivative weights inherit the same license and naming requirements.
Redistribution
Often restricted. Look for attribution, naming, and acceptable-use requirements that apply to any copy you share.

Uncertainty around licensing can delay or stop a project, and acceptable-use policies attached to custom licenses are binding terms rather than guidance. Review them alongside the PaliGemma license before production deployment.

Do I need a commercial license for PaliGemma?

If the custom terms rule out your use case, a commercial license from the rights holder is the way through. Roboflow's licensing page lists the supported models whose commercial license is included in a Roboflow plan, so it is worth checking whether PaliGemma — or a permissively licensed alternative — fits your deployment.

Do not hesitate to reach out with questions for your commercial project — our team will help you start solving business problems on the first call. See Roboflow commercial licensing for the models included in each plan.

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This model is released under a custom license that does not match a standard open-source identifier. Read the full license text linked from the model documentation.

Custom licenses vary widely in what they permit. Many model-specific custom licenses include commercial-use restrictions (e.g., non-commercial weights, named-user limits, or jurisdiction restrictions). Read the full license before deploying commercially.

Custom licenses are model-specific. Always check the per-model License Notes section above and the linked official license text.

PaliGemma is released under Google's Gemma license. Review the Gemma Terms of Use before commercial deployment.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.