Taobao Flash Sale has officially released its vertical domain open-source large model "Baize" (Ostrakon-VL), aiming to tackle food safety governance challenges in catering services and retail stores through AI technology. The related academic paper of the model was published in January 2026, marking the practical application of China's first multimodal large language model specifically designed for kitchen areas and retail scenarios. Taobao Flash Sale also announced that it will freely open up the technical capabilities of "Baize" to the entire industry.

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Technically, "Baize" is based on the $Qwen3-VL-8B$ architecture, with deep optimization for complex image features in catering environments. The model can achieve 24-hour non-stop monitoring of kitchen behavior and violation alerts, effectively covering core aspects such as merchant onboarding review and daily inspections, solving the pain points of high labor costs and low identification accuracy in traditional management models. The development team also launched the industry's first public benchmark test set ShopBench, filling the gap in performance evaluation of large models in the retail sector.

Under the context of the 2026 AI application boom and the implementation of new regulations for online catering, this open-source initiative by Taobao Flash Sale strengthens the responsibility of food safety through digital means and accelerates the intelligent upgrade of the "Transparent Kitchen" project. The practical application of this vertical domain model indicates that AI will become the core engine for standardization in the catering and retail sectors in the future.