Instructions to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.
- Libraries
- Transformers
How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct with Transformers:
# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper from transformers import pipeline pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct") messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"}, {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"} ] }, ] pipe(text=messages)# pip install -U transformers accelerate # Load model directly from transformers import AutoProcessor, AutoModelForMultimodalLM processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct") model = AutoModelForMultimodalLM.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct", device_map="auto") messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"}, {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"} ] }, ] inputs = processor.apply_chat_template( messages, add_generation_prompt=True, tokenize=True, return_dict=True, return_tensors="pt", ).to(model.device) outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256) print(processor.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:])) - Notebooks
- Google Colab
- Kaggle
- Local Apps Settings
- vLLM
How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct with vLLM:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install vLLM from pip: pip install vllm # Start the vLLM server: vllm serve "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct" # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }'Use Docker
docker model run hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct
- SGLang
How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct with SGLang:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install SGLang from pip: pip install sglang # Start the SGLang server: python3 -m sglang.launch_server \ --model-path "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct" \ --host 0.0.0.0 \ --port 30000 # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }'Use Docker images
docker run --gpus all \ --shm-size 32g \ -p 30000:30000 \ -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \ --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \ --ipc=host \ lmsysorg/sglang:latest \ python3 -m sglang.launch_server \ --model-path "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct" \ --host 0.0.0.0 \ --port 30000 # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }' - Docker Model Runner
How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct with Docker Model Runner:
docker model run hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct
Chat template: render string `content` instead of dropping it
Same change as SmolVLM2-2.2B-Instruct#32, which was merged; context in transformers#50613.
If a message's content is a string rather than a list of typed parts, the chat template drops its text without an error, so a string system prompt renders as System: <end_of_utterance>. This PR adds a string branch before the existing list handling, in chat_template.json and tokenizer_config.json (they hold the same template, identical to the one changed there):
-{{message['role'] | capitalize}}{% if message['content'][0]['type'] == 'image' %}{{':'}}{% else %}{{': '}}{% endif %}{% for line in message['content'] %}{% if line['type'] == 'text' %}{{line['text']}}{% elif line['type'] == 'image' %}{{ '<image>' }}{% endif %}{% endfor %}<end_of_utterance>
+{{message['role'] | capitalize}}{% if message['content'] is string %}{{': ' + message['content']}}{% else %}{% if message['content'][0]['type'] == 'image' %}{{':'}}{% else %}{{': '}}{% endif %}{% for line in message['content'] %}{% if line['type'] == 'text' %}{{line['text']}}{% elif line['type'] == 'image' %}{{ '<image>' }}{% endif %}{% endfor %}{% endif %}<end_of_utterance>
Checked with transformers 5.22.2 by loading this repo's files with the patched templates. Through AutoProcessor, a string system prompt now renders as System: Be brief., the same as [{"type": "text", "text": "Be brief."}], and list-content output is unchanged (text only, image first, text then image, two images, multi-turn; with and without add_generation_prompt). Through AutoTokenizer, a string user turn renders like the typed-part form. I haven't tested other template engines.
Written with help from an AI coding assistant, which made the change and ran the checks. I reviewed the diff and the check output.