Instructions to use TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

How to use TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B with Transformers:

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

pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B")
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("TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B")
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained("TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B")
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 TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B"
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B",
		"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/TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B

SGLang

How to use TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B 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 "TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B" \
    --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": "TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B",
		"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 "TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B" \
        --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": "TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B",
		"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 TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/TIGER-Lab/VL-Rethinker-7B
```
Browse Quantizations to use this model in llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio, or any compatible app.

VL-Rethinker-7B

🚀 News: We release our meticulously curated collection of RL training queries for multimodal reasoning: ViRL39K.

VL-Rethinker-7B achieves SoTA results on various multimodal reasoning benchmarks.

It is trained using the GRPO-SSR and Forced Rethinking techniques, using meticulously curated ViRL39K.

For details of our approach and performance comparison, please see our paper.

For details of training and evaluation, please see our code repo.

Explore further via the following links:

Citation

If you feel this model useful, please give us a free cite:

@article{vl-rethinker,
      title={VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learning},
      author = {Wang, Haozhe and Qu, Chao and Huang, Zuming and Chu, Wei and Lin,Fangzhen and Chen, Wenhu},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.08837},
      year={2025}
}