Instructions to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.
- Libraries
- Transformers
How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct with Transformers:
# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper from transformers import pipeline pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-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, AutoModelForMultimodalLM processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct") model = AutoModelForMultimodalLM.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-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=40) print(processor.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:])) - Notebooks
- Google Colab
- Kaggle
- Local Apps Settings
- vLLM
How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct with vLLM:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install vLLM from pip: pip install vllm # Start the vLLM server: vllm serve "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-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-256M-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-256M-Instruct
- SGLang
How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-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-256M-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-256M-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-256M-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-256M-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-256M-Instruct with Docker Model Runner:
docker model run hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct
Android + OpenCL implementation β runs on-device on non-flagship phones (Adreno 6xx)
Hi! I wanted to share an Android + OpenCL implementation of SmolVLM-256M-Instruct, in case anyone wants to run it on a phone:
- Try it: Edgi on Google Play β runs fully on-device, no cloud.
- Open source: the app is built on top of the open-source adreno-llms inference engine β https://github.com/a8nova/adreno-llms β pure C++/OpenCL with hand-written kernels tuned for Adreno; the vision tower, projector, and language model all run on the GPU.
It's tuned and tested on Adreno 6xx GPUs β the GPU class in mid-range and older Android phones (verified on a 2020 Motorola Razr / Adreno 620) β and should run on most arm64 Android phones with OpenCL, though the optimizations are Adreno-specific. On the Adreno 620 it describes images fully on-device, decoding at ~10.2 tok/s in fp16.
Hope it's useful β happy to answer questions!