multimodal_language_models.md

# Multimodal Language Models

These models accept multi-modal inputs (e.g., images and text) and generate text output. They augment language models
with multimodal encoders.

## Example launch Command

```shell
python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
  --model-path meta-llama/Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct \  # example HF/local path
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --port 30000 \
```

## Supporting Metrics

| Model Family (Variants)    | Example HuggingFace Identifier             | Chat Template    | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
|----------------------------|--------------------------------------------|------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Qwen-VL** (Qwen2 series) | `Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct`              | `qwen2-vl`       | Alibaba’s vision-language extension of Qwen; for example, Qwen2.5-VL (7B and larger variants) can analyze and converse about image content.                                                                     |
| **DeepSeek-VL2**           | `deepseek-ai/deepseek-vl2`                 | `deepseek-vl2`   | Vision-language variant of DeepSeek (with a dedicated image processor), enabling advanced multimodal reasoning on image and text inputs.                                                                        |
| **Janus-Pro** (1B, 7B)     | `deepseek-ai/Janus-Pro-7B`                 | `janus-pro`      | DeepSeek’s open-source multimodal model capable of both image understanding and generation. Janus-Pro employs a decoupled architecture for separate visual encoding paths, enhancing performance in both tasks. |
| **MiniCPM-V / MiniCPM-o**  | `openbmb/MiniCPM-V-2_6`                    | `minicpmv`       | MiniCPM-V (2.6, ~8B) supports image inputs, and MiniCPM-o adds audio/video; these multimodal LLMs are optimized for end-side deployment on mobile/edge devices.                                                 |
| **Llama 3.2 Vision** (11B) | `meta-llama/Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct` | `llama_3_vision` | Vision-enabled variant of Llama 3 (11B) that accepts image inputs for visual question answering and other multimodal tasks.                                                                                     |
| **LLaVA** (v1.5 & v1.6)    | *e.g.* `liuhaotian/llava-v1.5-13b`         | `vicuna_v1.1`    | Open vision-chat models that add an image encoder to LLaMA/Vicuna (e.g. LLaMA2 13B) for following multimodal instruction prompts.                                                                               |
| **LLaVA-NeXT** (8B, 72B)   | `lmms-lab/llava-next-72b`                  | `chatml-llava`   | Improved LLaVA models (with an 8B Llama3 version and a 72B version) offering enhanced visual instruction-following and accuracy on multimodal benchmarks.                                                       |
| **LLaVA-OneVision**        | `lmms-lab/llava-onevision-qwen2-7b-ov`     | `chatml-llava`   | Enhanced LLaVA variant integrating Qwen as the backbone; supports multiple images (and even video frames) as inputs via an OpenAI Vision API-compatible format.                                                 |
| **Gemma 3 (Multimodal)**   | `google/gemma-3-4b-it`                     | `gemma-it`       | Gemma 3's larger models (4B, 12B, 27B) accept images (each image encoded as 256 tokens) alongside text in a combined 128K-token context.                                                                        |
| **Kimi-VL** (A3B)          | `moonshotai/Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct`          | `kimi-vl`        | Kimi-VL is a multimodal model that can understand and generate text from images.                                                                                                                                |
| **Mistral-Small-3.1-24B**  | `mistralai/Mistral-Small-3.1-24B-Instruct-2503` | `mistral`   | Mistral 3.1 is a multimodal model that can generate text from text or images input. It also supports tool calling and structured output. |