# What is VLM? Definition & Technical Mechanics

> **Source:** [SPIDITS AI AI Glossary](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary)  
> **Category:** Neural Architectures  
> **Canonical Citation:** [https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/vision-language-model](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/vision-language-model)

## Definition
A Vision-Language Model (VLM) is a multimodal AI model trained on both images and text, enabling it to answer questions about visual content, describe images, or extract structured data from documents.

## Architectural Mechanics & Deep Dive
A Vision-Language Model (VLM) is a multimodal model capable of understanding and reasoning over both visual inputs (images) and text. By mapping images and text into a unified representation space, VLMs perform tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and document analysis from screenshots.

## Industry Applications & Real-World Use Cases
Visual question answering, invoice document processing, and image caption generation

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do VLMs connect images and text?
By processing the image through a vision encoder (like a CNN or ViT) and mapping those features to a projection layer that matches the text embedding space of the LLM.

### Give an example of a VLM task.
Asking a model to write code for a website based on a uploaded screenshot mockup.

## Related Terminology
- [multimodal-ai](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/multimodal-ai)
- [transformer](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/transformer)
- [vision-transformer](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/vision-transformer)

---
*From the SPIDITS AI Knowledge Base (336+ terms indexed). Explore full technical definitions: [https://spidits.com/ai-glossary](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary)*