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Phrase Grounding Models

Compare 3 phrase grounding models and try them on your own image, free in the Roboflow Playground. 3 are open-weight, so you can self-host them for free under their licenses.

3 models · 3 open-weight · 3 free to try · prices synced Jul 22, 2026

Open-Source Phrase Grounding Models

3 models with downloadable weights you can self-host under their licenses (Apache 2.0, MIT, and GPL v3). All run live in the Playground.

Qwen
Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multimodal language model developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba Group. It carries 35 billion total parameters but activates only approximately 3 billion per forward pass via a learned routing mechanism, giving it the representational capacity of a large dense model at a fraction of the inference compute. The model is natively multimodal, processing images, documents, and video alongside text as a core architectural capability rather than an add-on. It supports a native context window of 262,144 tokens, extensible up to 1,010,000 tokens via YaRN. A key design feature is the unified thinking/non-thinking mode framework: users can switch between deliberate chain-of-thought reasoning and fast direct responses within a single model, and a "thinking preservation" option retains reasoning context across multi-turn agentic workflows to reduce redundant computation.The model is specifically optimized for agentic coding tasks, including repository-level reasoning, frontend workflow generation, multi-step tool use, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. On SWE-bench Verified it scores 73.4%, on Terminal-Bench 2.0 it scores 51.5%, and on MCPMark it scores 37.0%. For vision-language tasks it achieves 92.0 on RefCOCO, 89.9 on OmniDocBench 1.5, and 83.7 on VideoMMMU. The model also supports Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) for speculative decoding. All Qwen3.6 open-weight models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Azure
Florence-2
Florence-2, introduced by Microsoft Research at CVPR 2024, is an open-source vision-language foundation model designed to unify diverse computer vision tasks within a single sequence-to-sequence framework. Unlike traditional models that specialize in specific tasks, Florence-2 accepts both images and text prompts and outputs text for tasks such as captioning, object detection, segmentation, OCR, and region-based grounding. It comes in two sizes—Florence-2-base (~230M parameters) and Florence-2-large (~770M parameters)—and is trained on FLD-5B, a large dataset of ~126M images with ~5.4B annotations.The model demonstrates strong zero-shot and fine-tuned performance, often rivaling larger vision-language systems while remaining lightweight and efficient. Released under the MIT license, all weights are publicly available, making it accessible for fine-tuning and deployment in applications like VQA, content tagging, accessibility, and research. Florence-2’s compact design, versatility, and openness position it as a practical alternative to larger proprietary multimodal models.
Tencent
YOLO World
YOLO-World v2 Small (YOLO-World-S-v2) is the smallest variant of Tencent AI Lab’s YOLO-World v2 family, released around February 2024 under GPL-v3. With ~13 million parameters, it adopts a prompt-then-detect paradigm using offline vocabularies and is pretrained on large-scale datasets such as Objects365 and GoldG. The model processes image inputs at 640×640 or 1280×1280 resolutions and supports zero-shot open-vocabulary object detection, enabling recognition of novel categories from text prompts without retraining.Evaluations show competitive results across benchmarks like LVIS and COCO, while maintaining real-time efficiency. On an NVIDIA V100, the small variant reaches ~74 FPS at standard resolutions. Together with larger YOLO-World v2 models, it provides a scalable framework for efficient, open-vocabulary detection across diverse deployment settings.

Frequently Asked Questions About Phrase Grounding Models

Phrase grounding is the task of localizing the exact image region that a text phrase refers to, linking language to pixels. Given "the person holding the red umbrella", the model must resolve attributes and relations between objects, not just find any person, and return that specific box or mask; referring expression comprehension is the one-target special case. Models align phrase embeddings with region features learned from image-text pairs. Grounding enables natural-language selection in editing tools, human-robot instructions, and precise multimodal search. This page lists 3 phrase grounding models, including 3 open-weight options you can self-host; all of them run live in the Playground so you can test them on your own images.

It depends on your task and constraints. For fixed categories in production, a model fine-tuned on your own data typically beats any general-purpose model. Compare the phrase grounding models on this page and try them on your own image to see which fits.

Yes. 3 of the 3 phrase grounding models here are open-weight (for example Qwen3.6 35B A3B, Florence-2, and YOLO World), free to self-host under their licenses (Apache 2.0, MIT, and GPL v3).

Yes. You can run all 3 in the Roboflow Playground for free. Upload an image and compare the models' output side by side, no setup required.

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