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library_name: transformers
tags: []

Model Card for Model ID

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.

We release the checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 license.

Model Details

Model Description

This is the model card of a 🤗 transformers model that has been pushed on the Hub. This model card has been automatically generated.

Developed by: Hugging Face 🤗
Model type: Multi-modal model (image+text)
Language(s) (NLP): English
License: Apache 2.0

Model Sources [optional]

Repository: [More Information Needed]
Paper [optional]: [More Information Needed]
Demo [optional]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM

Uses

SmolVLM can be used for inference on multimodal (image + text) tasks where the input comprises text queries along with one or more images. Text and images can be interleaved arbitrarily, enabling tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and storytelling based on visual content. The model does not support image generation.

To fine-tune SmolVLM on a specific task, you can follow the fine-tuning tutorial.

Technical Summary

SmolVLM leverages the lightweight SmolLM2 language model to provide a compact yet powerful multimodal experience. It introduces several changes compared to previous models:

Image compression: We introduce a more radical image compression compared to Idefics3 to enable the model to infer faster and use less RAM.
Visual Token Encoding: It uses 81 visual tokens to encode image patches of size 384*384. Larger images are divided into patches, each encoded separately, enhancing efficiency without compromising performance.

More details about the training and architecture are available in our technical report.

How to get started

import torch
from PIL import Image
from transformers import AutoProcessor, AutoModelForVision2Seq
from transformers.image_utils import load_image

DEVICE = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"

# Load images
image1 = load_image("https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg")
image2 = load_image("https://huggingface.co/spaces/merve/chameleon-7b/resolve/main/bee.jpg")

# Initialize processor and model
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct")
model = AutoModelForVision2Seq.from_pretrained(
    "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16
).to(DEVICE)

# Create input messages
messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image"},
            {"type": "text", "text": "What do we see in this image?"}
        ]
    },
    {
        "role": "assistant",
        "content": [
            {"type": "text", "text": "This image shows a city skyline with prominent landmarks."}
        ]
    },
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image"},
            {"type": "text", "text": "And how about this image?"}
        ]
    }
]

# Prepare inputs
prompt = processor.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True)
inputs = processor(text=prompt, images=[image1, image2], return_tensors="pt")
inputs = {k: v.to(DEVICE) for k, v in inputs.items()}

# Generate outputs
generated_ids = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=500)
generated_texts = processor.batch_decode(generated_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)

print(generated_texts[0])

Model optimizations

Precision: For better performance, load and run the model in half-precision (torch.float16 or torch.bfloat16) if your hardware supports it.

model = AutoModelForVision2Seq.from_pretrained(
    "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-Instruct",
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16
).to(DEVICE)

Vision Encoder Efficiency: Adjust the image resolution by setting size={"longest_edge": N*384} when initializing the processor, where N is your desired value. The default N=4 works well, but for documents, N=5 might be beneficial. Decreasing N can save GPU memory for lower-resolution images. This is also useful if you want to fine-tune on videos.

Misuse and Out-of-scope Use

SmolVLM is not intended for high-stakes scenarios or critical decision-making processes that affect an individual's well-being or livelihood. The model may produce content that appears factual but may not be accurate. Misuse includes, but is not limited to:

Prohibited Uses:
- Evaluating or scoring individuals (e.g., in employment, education, credit)
- Critical automated decision-making
- Generating unreliable factual content
Malicious Activities:
- Spam generation
- Disinformation campaigns
- Harassment or abuse
- Unauthorized surveillance

License

SmolVLM is built upon the following pre-trained models:

https://huggingface.co/google/siglip-so400m-patch14-384 https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct

We release the SmolVLM checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 license.

Training Details

Training Data

The training data

Training Procedure

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Evaluation

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Summary

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Environmental Impact

Carbon emissions can be estimated using the Machine Learning Impact calculator presented in Lacoste et al. (2019).

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