DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding presents an open-source VL model that is strategically designed to handle practical scenarios involving web content, OCR, charts, and knowledge-driven material.

• The model uses diverse and scalable data to capture real-world contexts effectively.
• Fine-tuning enhances user experience by substantially improving model application performance.
• A hybrid vision encoder enables the efficient processing of high-resolution images.
• The model preserves LLM capabilities within a VL pretraining strategy.

DeepSeek-VL positions itself as a game-changer by providing state-of-the-art or competitive performance across various benchmarks while maintaining robust language capabilities. The model’s release aims to fuel further research and innovation, showcasing the possibilities of real-world application of VL models. The advancements in DeepSeek-VL also emphasize the importance of integrating strong language capabilities in VL tasks, offering new directions for future models.