illuin-tech/colpali

Health v2 · maintenance only

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2836 stars · 268 forks observed · 2026-10-17

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

ColPali Engine is the Python library for training and running inference with ColVision visual document retrieval models such as ColPali, ColQwen2, and ColSmol. It uses vision-language models to build multi-vector embeddings of document pages, replacing brittle OCR and layout-parsing pipelines. The package is now deprecated in favor of Sentence Transformers' MultiVectorEncoder.

Use cases

• retrieve documents from pdfs using vision language models
• train a ColPali-style visual document retriever
• index scanned document pages without OCR pipelines
• run inference with ColQwen2 or ColSmol models
• build a RAG pipeline over visually complex documents
• reproduce results from the ColPali paper and ViDoRe benchmark

When to choose

• you need to reproduce ColPali/ColVision research results or use existing trained checkpoints
• your documents are visually complex (tables, charts, layouts) and OCR pipelines fail
• you want multi-vector late-interaction retrieval over document page images

When to avoid

• you are starting a new production project - use Sentence Transformers v6 MultiVectorEncoder instead
• you only need plain text embedding retrieval without visual content
• you cannot run GPU inference for vision-language models

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

machine-learning rag search-engine llm-training nlp machine-learning computer-vision pdf python vision-language-models document-retrieval colpali colqwen2 multi-vector-embeddings colbert vidore-benchmark deprecated retrieval-augmented-generation search gpu

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