Claims and evidence
- Released Primary source[1]page date
- Status Available Primary source[2]model repository (weights hosted on the Hub)
- Derived from (other) SmolLM2SmolLM2 serves as the language backbone of the vision-language model (the 1.7B Instruct checkpoint after a context extension to 16k tokens); the 256M and 500M variants use SmolLM2-135M-Instruct and SmolLM2-360M-Instruct. Primary source[1]Architecture: SmolLM2 1.7B as the language backbone [2]metadata base_model: HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct
- Change · Architecture Uses SmolLM2 1.7B instead of Llama 3.1 8B as the language backbone, within the Idefics3 architecture.Compared with Idefics3 Primary source[1]Architecture
- Change · Efficiency Compresses visual information 9x with pixel shuffle, compared with 4x in Idefics3.Compared with Idefics3 Primary source[1]Architecture
- Change · Size About 2B parameters in total, with a 1.7B language backbone in place of an 8B one.Compared with Idefics3 Primary source[1]
- Input text, image Primary source[2]introduction; Model Summary: Model type
- Output text Primary source[2]introduction
- Open weights Yes Primary source[1]TLDR: checkpoints released under Apache 2.0 [2]Model Summary: License
- Context window 16k tokens tokensContext of the SmolLM2 backbone after extension, for the 2B model; the 256M and 500M variants use 8k. Primary source[1]Training Details: Context extension
- Parameters 2BThe November 2024 model; later Hugging Face pages give 2.2B. Primary source[1]TLDR
- Access Open-weights download, On device Primary source[2]introduction: suitable for on-device applications [1]What is SmolVLM?
Lineage
Variants
SmolVLM 2B
Same dates as SmolVLM.
- Variant Inline variant in this record.The November 2024 release: SmolVLM-Base, SmolVLM-Synthetic and SmolVLM-Instruct. Later Hugging Face pages call this size SmolVLM 2.2B. Primary source[1]What is SmolVLM?: three released models [2]Model Summary
Also known as: SmolVLM-Instruct, SmolVLM-Base, SmolVLM-Synthetic, SmolVLM 2.2B
SmolVLM-256M
- Released Primary source[3]page date
- Variant Inline variant in this record.Added to the SmolVLM family on 2025-01-23 together with SmolVLM-500M, as base and Instruct checkpoints. Language backbone SmolLM2-135M-Instruct; vision encoder SigLIP base patch-16/512 (93M) instead of SigLIP 400M SO. Primary source[3]TLDR; What Changed Since SmolVLM 2B? [5]metadata base_model; Technical Summary
Also known as: SmolVLM-256M-Base, SmolVLM-256M-Instruct
Differs in:
SmolVLM-500M
- Released Primary source[3]page date
- Variant Inline variant in this record.Added to the SmolVLM family on 2025-01-23 together with SmolVLM-256M, as base and Instruct checkpoints. Language backbone SmolLM2-360M-Instruct; vision encoder SigLIP base patch-16/512 (93M). Primary source[3]TLDR; A Step Up: 500M [6]metadata base_model
Also known as: SmolVLM-500M-Base, SmolVLM-500M-Instruct
Differs in:
Related AI Radar coverage
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