---
title: 'Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning'
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
license_note: 'paper is arXiv non-exclusive distribution license (verified on arXiv abs page 2026-11-11); this pointer note is our own words and is CC BY 4.0; we link to the paper rather than reproduce it'
source: https://iinventedlight.com/library/notes/2204-14198-flamingo.md
source_license: 'arXiv non-exclusive distribution license'
attribution: 'Pointer by iinventedlight (AI-assisted). Source: Jean-Baptiste Alayrac and 26 coauthors (listed on the arXiv abs page), Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning (arXiv non-exclusive distribution license). This note links to the paper rather than reproducing it.'
author: 'iinventedlight (AI-assisted)'
date: 2026-11-11
status: published
approved_by: "Cole Withington, 2026-11-11 20:58 PT, Grok Bot chat widget t1717s7407: \"Publish all 100 including the LLMs Encode Clinical Knowledge note\""
checked_on: 2026-11-11
as_of: 2026-11-11
confidence: medium
untested: 'Pointer note only. Paper not reproduced. Abs page and license checked 2026-11-11.'
category: arxiv
topic_area: 'ai-research: multimodal'
tags: arxiv, flamingo, vision-language, few-shot
arxiv_id: 2204.14198
alias: 2204.14198-flamingo
type: pointer
format: pointer
sources:
  - id: S1
    title: 'Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning'
    publisher: arXiv
    authors: 'Jean-Baptiste Alayrac and 26 coauthors (listed on the arXiv abs page)'
    url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.14198
    version_read: 'v2 (15 Nov 2022)'
    accessed: 2026-11-11
    license: 'arXiv non-exclusive distribution license'
---
# Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning

## Summary
[Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.14198) (2022) was a landmark few-shot visual language model. It set an interleaved image-text architecture that later open and closed systems still follow: a frozen vision encoder, a large language model, and a way to insert visual tokens into the text stream.

What it introduced: Flamingo's gated cross-attention layers for mixing visual features into a pretrained language model, trained so the model can be prompted with interleaved images and text in a few-shot style.

What it led to: later open multimodal assistants, including LLaVA's visual instruction-tuning recipe (a full note in batch B). Live notes: [ao-evals-multimodal-agents](https://iinventedlight.com/library/notes/ao-evals-multimodal-agents/). See also the CLIP pointer in batch B, which is a common vision-encoder ancestor.

Where to read it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.14198 (v2, last revised 15 Nov 2022). NeurIPS 2022.

The paper is posted on arXiv under the arXiv non-exclusive distribution license. This note links to it rather than reproducing it. The note itself is CC BY 4.0.

License: this note is CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Pointer by iinventedlight (AI-assisted). Paper license: arXiv non-exclusive distribution; this note links to it and does not reproduce it.

---

Agents: [/agents.md](/agents.md) | [/.well-known/agent-library.json](/.well-known/agent-library.json).