Open-domain Visual Entity Recognition: Towards Recognizing Millions of Wikipedia Entities

Large-scale multi-modal pre-training models such as CLIP and PaLI exhibitstrong generalization on various visual domains and tasks. However, existingimage classification benchmarks often evaluate recognition on a specific domain(e.g., outdoor images) or a specific task (e.g., classifying plant species),which falls short of evaluating whether pre-trained foundational models areuniversal visual recognizers. To address this, we formally present the task ofOpen-domain Visual Entity recognitioN (OVEN), where a model need to link animage onto a Wikipedia entity with respect to a text query. We constructOVEN-Wiki by re-purposing 14 existing datasets with all labels grounded ontoone single label space: Wikipedia entities. OVEN challenges models to selectamong six million possible Wikipedia entities, making it a general visualrecognition benchmark with the largest number of labels. Our study onstate-of-the-art pre-trained models reveals large headroom in generalizing tothe massive-scale label space. We show that a PaLI-based auto-regressive visualrecognition model performs surprisingly well, even on Wikipedia entities thathave never been seen during fine-tuning. We also find existing pretrainedmodels yield different strengths: while PaLI-based models obtain higher overallperformance, CLIP-based models are better at recognizing tail entities.