Instructions to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct with Transformers:

# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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)

# Load model directly
from transformers import AutoProcessor, AutoModelForImageTextToText

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct")
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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?"}
        ]
    },
]
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=40)
print(processor.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:]))

Notebooks
Google Colab
Kaggle
Local Apps

vLLM

How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct

SGLang

How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-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/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct
```

mfarre commited on Mar 6, 2025

Commit

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@@ -197,11 +197,10 @@ We release the SmolVLM2 checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 license.
 ## Citation information
 You can cite us in the following way:
 ```bibtex
-@misc{smolvlm2,
-  title = {SmolVLM2: Bringing Video Understanding to Every Device},
-  author = {Orr Zohar and Miquel Farré and Andi Marafioti and Merve Noyan and Pedro Cuenca and Cyril Zakka and Joshua Lochner},
   year = {2025},
-  url = {https://huggingface.co/blog/smolvlm2}
 }
 ```

 ## Citation information
 You can cite us in the following way:
 ```bibtex
+@unpublished{marafioti2025smolvlm,
+  title = {SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models},
+  author = {Marafioti, Andr\'{e}s and Zohar, Orr and Farr\'{e}, Miquel and Noyan, Merve and Bakouch, Elie and Cuenca, Pedro and Zakka, Cyril and Ben Allal, Loubna and Lozhkov, Anton and Tazi, Nouamane and Srivastav, Vaibhav and Lochner, Joshua and Larcher, Hugo and Morlon, Mathieu and Tunstall, Lewis and von Werra, Leandro and Wolf, Thomas},
   year = {2025},
 }
 ```