---
language:
- en
license: apache-2.0
library_name: mlx
pipeline_tag: image-text-to-text
base_model: Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI-8B
tags:
- mlx
- mlx-vlm
- safetensors
- apple-silicon
- conversational
- gui
- vision-language-model
- qwen3_vl
- mai-ui
- grounding
- mobile-navigation
- computer-use
- agent
- 4-bit
- quantized
---

# MAI-UI-8B 4bit

This is a 4-bit quantized MLX conversion of [Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI-8B](https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI-8B), optimized for Apple Silicon.

MAI-UI is a family of real-world centric foundation GUI agents built for grounding, GUI navigation, user interaction, and broader device-cloud agent workflows. The family spans multiple scales and is framed upstream around realistic deployment, including user interaction, MCP-style tool use, online RL, and device-cloud collaboration.

This artifact was derived from the validated local MLX `bf16` reference conversion and then quantized with `mlx-vlm`. It was validated locally with both `mlx_vlm` prompt-packet checks and `vllm-mlx` OpenAI-compatible serve checks.

## Conversion Details

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Upstream model | `Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI-8B` |
| Artifact type | `4bit quantized MLX conversion` |
| Source artifact | local validated `bf16` MLX artifact |
| Conversion tool | `mlx_vlm.convert` via `mlx-vlm 0.3.12` |
| Python | `3.11.14` |
| MLX | `0.31.0` |
| Transformers | `5.2.0` |
| Validation backend | `vllm-mlx (phase/p1 @ 8a5d41b)` |
| Quantization | `4bit` |
| Group size | `64` |
| Quantization mode | `affine` |
| Converter dtype note | `float32` |
| Reported effective bits per weight | `6.776` |
| Artifact size | `6.93G` |
| Template repair | `tokenizer_config.json["chat_template"]` was re-injected from `chat_template.jinja` after quantization |

Additional notes:

- Root-level packaging is intentional for `vllm-mlx` multimodal detection compatibility.
- `processor_config.json` and `video_preprocessor_config.json` are present at repo root.
- This artifact intentionally augments tokenizer-visible template metadata for downstream compatibility checks.

## Validation

This artifact passed local validation in this workspace:

- `mlx_vlm` prompt-packet validation: `PASS`
- `vllm-mlx` OpenAI-compatible serve validation: `PASS`

Local validation notes:

- output shape stayed aligned with the local `bf16` and `6bit` reference artifacts
- grounding drift increased relative to `6bit`, but still returned the correct label and a plausible lower-screen input-region box
- the known baseline schema limitation remained unchanged from `bf16`: the structured-action output still omitted the requested `reason` field

## Performance

- Artifact size on disk: `6.93G`
- Local fixed-packet `mlx_vlm` validation used about `32.74 GB` peak memory
- Observed local fixed-packet throughput was about `164-172` prompt tok/s and `44.5-48.7` generation tok/s across the four validation prompts
- Local `vllm-mlx` non-stream request time was about `27.46s`, materially slower than the `bf16` reference run and close to `6bit`

These are local validation measurements, not a full benchmark suite.

## Usage

### Install

```bash
pip install -U mlx-vlm
```

### CLI

```bash
python -m mlx_vlm.generate \
  --model mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-4bit \
  --image path/to/image.png \
  --prompt "Describe the visible controls on this screen." \
  --max-tokens 256 \
  --temperature 0.0
```

### Python

```python
from mlx_vlm import load, generate

model, processor = load("mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-4bit")
result = generate(
    model,
    processor,
    prompt="Describe the visible controls on this screen.",
    image="path/to/image.png",
    max_tokens=256,
    temp=0.0,
)
print(result.text)
```

### vllm-mlx Serve

```bash
python -m vllm_mlx.cli serve mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-4bit --mllm --localhost --port 8000
```

## Links

- Upstream model: [Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI-8B](https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI-8B)
- Paper: [MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents](https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22047)
- Project page: [tongyi-mai.github.io/MAI-UI](https://tongyi-mai.github.io/MAI-UI/)
- GitHub: [Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI](https://github.com/Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI)
- MLX framework: [ml-explore/mlx](https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx)
- mlx-vlm: [Blaizzy/mlx-vlm](https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-vlm)

## Other Quantizations

Planned sibling repos in this wave:

- [`mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-bf16`](https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-bf16)
- [`mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-6bit`](https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-6bit)
- [`mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-4bit`](https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/MAI-UI-8B-4bit) - this model

## Notes and Limitations

- This card reports local MLX conversion and validation results only.
- Upstream benchmark claims belong to the original MAI-UI model family and were not re-run here unless explicitly stated.
- Quantization changes numerical behavior relative to the local `bf16` reference artifact.
- In local validation, the main trade relative to `bf16` was increased grounding drift plus slower prefill, not response collapse.

## Citation

If you use this MLX conversion, please also cite the original MAI-UI work:

```bibtex
@misc{zhou2025maiuitechnicalreportrealworld,
  title={MAI-UI Technical Report: Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents},
  author={Hanzhang Zhou and Xu Zhang and Panrong Tong and Jianan Zhang and Liangyu Chen and Quyu Kong and Chenglin Cai and Chen Liu and Yue Wang and Jingren Zhou and Steven Hoi},
  year={2025},
  eprint={2512.22047},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CV},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22047},
}
```

## License

This repo follows the upstream model license: Apache 2.0.
See the upstream model card for the authoritative license details:
[Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI-8B](https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/MAI-UI-8B).