---
license: apache-2.0
language:
- en
tags:
- multimodal
- vision-language
- vlm
- artemis
- schneewolf-labs
- stage1
- projector-trained
base_model:
- schneewolflabs/A2
- Qwen/Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
datasets:
- BLIP3o/BLIP3o-Pretrain-Long-Caption
pipeline_tag: image-text-to-text
library_name: transformers
---

# A3

> **Project Artemis — Stage-1.** A3 is the projector-aligned successor to
> [A3-preview](https://huggingface.co/schneewolflabs/A3-preview): same
> architecture, **40× more training data, ~10× more optimizer steps, dramatically
> sharper image grounding.** A3 produces detailed descriptive captions on
> diverse images. It is *not* an instruction-tuned VLM — visual VQA, OCR-as-
> task, multi-turn visual reasoning, and tool calling are the job of **Artemis**
> (Stage-2), which builds on A3.

## What this is

The same LLaVA-style graft as A3-preview:

| Component | Source | Role |
|---|---|---|
| **Vision tower** | `Qwen/Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct` (ViT, ~600M params) | Image → visual feature tokens |
| **Projector** | Trained 2-layer MLP, ~45M params | Visual hidden → text hidden bridge |
| **Language model** | `schneewolflabs/A2` (~12B params) | Unchanged decoder |

Only the projector trained. Vision tower and decoder are frozen exactly as
published — A2's reasoning, tool calling, identity, and Qwen3 chat template
behavior are byte-identical to A2 text-only by construction.

## Training details

| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Corpus | `BLIP3o/BLIP3o-Pretrain-Long-Caption` (1,000,000 streamed samples) |
| Optimizer | AdamW (fp32 moments), lr 1e-3 cosine to 0, 5% warmup |
| Effective batch | 32 (bs=2 × grad_accum=16) |
| Steps | **31,219** (1 epoch, ~0.5% held out for eval) |
| Precision | bfloat16 |
| Hardware | single NVIDIA GB10 (DGX Spark) |
| Wall clock | **130h 54m ≈ 5.45 days** |
| Train loss | 5.55 → **0.65** |
| Eval loss | 5.55 → **0.60** on held-out BLIP3o |

### Eval curve (held-out subset)

The full power-law decay across the run:

| Step | % | eval/loss |
|---:|---:|---:|
| 0 | 0% | 5.5491 |
| 1,560 | 5% | 0.7823 ← matched A3-preview's *final* score in 1/10th the steps |
| 6,240 | 20% | 0.6787 |
| 15,600 | 50% | 0.6248 |
| 23,400 | 75% | 0.6027 |
| 28,080 | 90% | 0.6007 |
| **31,219** | **100%** | **0.6006** |

Cleanly asymptoted in the cosine tail — the projector has converged for this
LR schedule.

## Hold-out comparison vs A3-preview

A3 vs A3-preview on the same 4 held-out images (2 BLIP3o + 2 OOD Japanese
photos, deterministic generation, max_new_tokens=150). A3 wins decisively
on 3/4, ties on 1.

### 1. BLIP3o — abandoned lighthouse

| | |
|---|---|
| Ground truth | "weathered, abandoned **lighthouse**... peeling paint and rust" |
| A3-preview | "old, weathered **structure**... single-story with flat roof and ladder" |
| **A3** | "old, weathered **lighthouse**... peeling paint and **visible rust**" |

### 2. BLIP3o — historic Indian fort wall

| | |
|---|---|
| Ground truth | "fort wall with arrow slits... India" |
| A3-preview | "weathered stone wall with rectangular openings... India" |
| **A3** | "historic **fort wall**... **reddish-brown stone**... for **defensive purposes**... **blue roofs**" |

### 3. OOD — bar scene with cocktails

| | |
|---|---|
| Ground truth | "Charles Vanot Curaçao Bleu liqueur, **Panda** gin, **treble clef** stirrer" |
| A3-preview | '"Charles **Vian**"... blue bottle' *(missed Panda entirely)* |
| **A3** | '**Charles Vannier**, **Panda**, **musical note stirrer**' |

### 4. OOD — Gundam statue at LaLaport

| | |
|---|---|
| Ground truth | "RX-93ff Nu Gundam... LaLaport Fukuoka... LED lights" |
| A3-preview | "Gundam statue... Lalaport mall... illuminated by spotlights" |
| **A3** | 'Gundam statue... "Lalaport"... **life-sized model**... overcast sky' |

The pattern: A3 **names the actual subject** instead of describing it
generically, and the **brand/entity text reading** is meaningfully sharper.
The loss-curve delta (eval 0.77 → 0.60) translates directly into
specific-entity recognition.

## What works

Descriptive captioning across diverse domains — image-grounded, names
specific objects, picks up brand text on OOD inputs, identifies real-world
subjects (lighthouses, fort walls, statues, products). The 12B A2 decoder
gives the prose noticeably more fluency than 2B-class VLMs at the same task.

## What this is *not*

- **Not a fully instruction-tuned VLM.** Visual instruction-following,
  VQA ("count the cats", "what color is the second item"), OCR-as-task,
  multi-turn visual reasoning, and tool calling on images **are not trained
  here.** Asked to do any of those, A3 will fall back to "describe."
- **No safety / refusal tuning** on visual inputs.
- **No multi-image or video** — single image per turn.

These are precisely what **Artemis (Stage-2)** is for.

## What's next

- **Artemis** — Stage-2 multimodal instruction FFT on top of A3. Full FFT of
  the decoder + projector, frozen ViT, with heavy text rehearsal (A2 tool
  calling + i-DPO identity + reasoning data) to protect the underlying A2
  capabilities through the visual instruction phase. The named flagship
  multimodal release.

## Install

```bash
pip install 'artemis-vlm @ git+https://github.com/Schneewolf-Labs/Artemis.git@v0.1.0'
```

The [`artemis-vlm`](https://github.com/Schneewolf-Labs/Artemis) package
contains the model class, processor, and data collator. On import, it
registers `artemis_vlm` with HuggingFace AutoConfig and
AutoModelForCausalLM so `from_pretrained()` resolves without
`trust_remote_code`.

## Usage

```python
import torch
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM
import artemis_vlm  # registers ArtemisVLM with AutoConfig / AutoModel

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "schneewolflabs/A3", dtype=torch.bfloat16,
).to("cuda").eval()

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("schneewolflabs/A3")
processor = artemis_vlm.ArtemisVLMProcessor(
    tokenizer=tok, vision_config=model.visual.config,
    min_pixels=32 * 32, max_pixels=512 * 512,
)

# Qwen3 chat-template multimodal message
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": [
    {"type": "image"},
    {"type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in detail."},
]}]
text = processor.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True, tokenize=False)

from PIL import Image
image = Image.open("your_image.jpg")
batch = processor(text=text, images=[image], return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")
with torch.no_grad():
    out = model.generate(**batch, max_new_tokens=200, do_sample=False)
print(tok.decode(out[0][batch["input_ids"].shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

## Architecture notes (Path B — composition not modification)

A3 grafts a Qwen3-VL vision tower onto an unmodified A2 text decoder via a
learned 2-layer MLP projector. The decoder's vocabulary, weights, chat
template, reasoning, tool calling, and identity are *byte-identical* to A2
text-only — the multimodal addition cannot regress text capability because
the text computation path doesn't change.

Vision tokens enter through A2's repurposed reserved-token layout
(`<|image_pad|>` = token id 22 in the A-series Tekken vocab — see the A1
release notes for the full token-id allocation across `<think>`,
`<tool_call>`, vision, etc.). The Qwen tokenizer is never in the picture;
the projector bridges *hidden spaces*, not token spaces.

See the [`Artemis` repo README](https://github.com/Schneewolf-Labs/Artemis)
for the full architectural breakdown.

## License

Apache 2.0. Same as A1, A2, A3-preview, and the underlying Qwen3-VL vision
tower and BLIP3o-Pretrain-Long-Caption corpus.

## Acknowledgements

- **BLIP3o team** for the Pretrain-Long-Caption corpus
- **Qwen team** for the Qwen3-VL vision encoder
- **LLaVA project** for the architectural template
- **Schneewolf Labs Merlina + Artemis** for the training and architecture infrastructure

— Schneewolf Labs · Project Artemis · Stage-1