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

Libraries

How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct with Transformers:

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

pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-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/SmolVLM-Instruct")
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-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/SmolVLM-Instruct with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-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-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-Instruct

SGLang

How to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-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-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-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-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-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-Instruct with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct
```

nielsr HF Staff commited on Apr 9, 2025

Commit

f7abb40

verified ·

1 Parent(s): 81cd9a7

Fix pipeline tag and add link to paper

Browse files

This PR improves the model card, ensuring:

- the model can be found at https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=image-text-to-text&sort=trending, which is the correct pipeline tag
- the model card is linked to https://huggingface.co/papers/2504.05299

Files changed (1) hide show

README.md +10 -6

README.md CHANGED Viewed

@@ -1,21 +1,24 @@
 ---
-library_name: transformers
-license: apache-2.0
 datasets:
 - HuggingFaceM4/the_cauldron
 - HuggingFaceM4/Docmatix
-pipeline_tag: image-text-to-text
 language:
 - en
-base_model:
-- HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct
-- google/siglip-so400m-patch14-384
 ---
 <img src="https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/SmolVLM.png" width="800" height="auto" alt="Image description">
 # SmolVLM
 SmolVLM is a compact open multimodal model that accepts arbitrary sequences of image and text inputs to produce text outputs. Designed for efficiency, SmolVLM can answer questions about images, describe visual content, create stories grounded on multiple images, or function as a pure language model without visual inputs. Its lightweight architecture makes it suitable for on-device applications while maintaining strong performance on multimodal tasks.
 ## Model Summary
@@ -188,4 +191,5 @@ You can cite us in the following way:
   journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05299},
   year={2025}
 }
 ```

 ---
+base_model:
+- HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct
+- google/siglip-so400m-patch14-384
 datasets:
 - HuggingFaceM4/the_cauldron
 - HuggingFaceM4/Docmatix
 language:
 - en
+library_name: transformers
+license: apache-2.0
+pipeline_tag: image-text-to-text
 ---
+```markdown
 <img src="https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/SmolVLM.png" width="800" height="auto" alt="Image description">
 # SmolVLM
+This repository contains the model for [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://huggingface.co/papers/2504.05299).
 SmolVLM is a compact open multimodal model that accepts arbitrary sequences of image and text inputs to produce text outputs. Designed for efficiency, SmolVLM can answer questions about images, describe visual content, create stories grounded on multiple images, or function as a pure language model without visual inputs. Its lightweight architecture makes it suitable for on-device applications while maintaining strong performance on multimodal tasks.
 ## Model Summary
   journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05299},
   year={2025}
 }
+```
 ```