VLMs — Giving Language Models the Gift of Sight.
This article provides an overview of Vision Language Models (VLMs), a class of multimodal systems that integrate visual perception with language understanding. It traces their evolution from early image–text alignment models like CLIP to modern large multimodal models with native vision capabilities. The article explains how VLMs are trained using joint learning on image–text data with contrastive, generative, and alignment objectives, and categorizes major architectural approaches such as joint tokenization, frozen visual prefixes, cross-attention fusion, and training-free stitching. It also outlines key datasets used for training, common evaluation benchmarks for visual reasoning and video understanding, and emerging trends including unified token spaces, end-to-end training, and long-context vision for handling extended visual sequences.