This work explores the use and development of vision-language models for various vision tasks. We are interested in developing novel algorithms for this field, and in applying these algorithms to solve real-world problems. Recent research includes query adaptive retrieval improvement (QuARI) for vision-language models, learning from concepts in text for composed image retrieval (ConText-CIR), and vision-language pseudo-labels for single-positive multi-label learning. Our work applies vision-language models to diverse applications including natural world imagery understanding, geospatial analysis, and multimodal learning across image, text, and audio modalities.