Vision-Language Model (VLM) — AI Glossary

A vision-language model (VLM) is an AI system that can process, understand, and reason about both visual inputs (images, screenshots, diagrams) and text simultaneously within a single model architecture. VLMs encode images into the same representational space as text, enabling tasks like visual question answering, image captioning, document understanding, and visual reasoning that require interpreting both modalities together.