BLIP3-KALE: Knowledge Augmented Large-Scale Dense Captions

Abstract: We introduce BLIP3-KALE, a dataset of 218 million image-text pairs that bridges the gap between descriptive synthetic captions and factual web-scale alt-text. KALE augments synthetic dense image captions with web-scale alt-text to generate factually grounded image captions. Our two-stage approach leverages large vision-LLMs and LLMs to create knowledge-augmented captions, which are then used to train a specialized VLM for scaling up the dataset. We train vision-LLMs on KALE and demonstrate improvements on vision-language tasks. Our experiments show the utility of KALE for training more capable and knowledgeable multimodal models. We release the KALE dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/blip3-kale