Compare the best 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 Aug 1, 2026
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 through hosted APIs, so self-hosting is optional.
Phrase grounding links a text phrase to the exact region it describes, resolving attributes and relations, not just class names. The choice is between grounding specialists and general VLMs.
Models built for grounding (Grounding DINO, Florence-2 with its grounding modes) return tight boxes for referring expressions like "the person holding the red umbrella" and are the right tool when the box itself is the product: selection interfaces, robotic pointing, precise multimodal search.
Frontier VLMs can ground phrases conversationally and then keep reasoning about the result, which suits assistant-style flows; their localization is generally looser than a specialist detector. If the pipeline consumes coordinates downstream, prefer the specialist; if a person consumes the answer, the VLM often suffices.
The bottom line: Pipelines that consume coordinates want a grounding specialist; conversational experiences can let a VLM ground and reason in one place.
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.
This page lists all 3 phrase grounding models in the Roboflow Playground catalog, all of them open-weight and free to self-host; all of them run live in the Roboflow Playground on your own images. Compare licenses, parameters, and release dates side by side, or open any model page for full details.