Instructions to use HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

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, AutoModelForImageTextToText

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct")
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained("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?"}
        ]
    },
]
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-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
```

There is an issue with AutoProcessor

by Tech-Meld - opened Jan 25, 2025

Discussion

Tech-Meld

Jan 25, 2025

when we run the provided demo code for this model we get this error:
PS C:\Users\HX\Documents\Projets\Maestro> & C:/Users/HX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/WindowsApps/python3.12.exe c:/Users/HX/Documents/Projets/Maestro/test.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "c:\Users\HX\Documents\Projets\Maestro\test.py", line 12, in
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct")
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "C:\Users\HX\AppData\Local\Packages\PythonSoftwareFoundation.Python.3.12_qbz5n2kfra8p0\LocalCache\local-packages\Python312\site-packages\transformers\models\auto\processing_auto.py", line 349, in from_pretrained
raise ValueError(
ValueError: Unrecognized processing class in HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct. Can't instantiate a processor, a tokenizer, an image processor or a feature extractor for this model. Make sure the repository contains the files of at least one of those processing classes.