Model reference · open weights

deepseek-vl

LLMs deepseek-community Vision + text 2 builds Its own licence terms 21k dl/mo

deepseek-vl is an open-weight language model from deepseek-community. deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat (FP16) weighs 3.9 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • Deepseek-VL is a vision-language model developed by the DeepSeek AI team for processing images and text to generate contextually relevant responses.
  • It uses LLaMA as its text encoder and SigLip for image encoding, with a parameter count of 2.0B and a context length of 16384 tokens.
  • The model is published under the deepseek licence and is designed for real-world vision and language understanding applications.

Summary of the deepseek-community/deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bydeepseek-community
Released2025-06-12
Parameters2.0B
VRAM3.9 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat (FP16)

3.9 GBweights, file size
197 MBcache per 1K tokens
1.9 GBruntime overhead, at least
16,384 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each
RTX 3060 12 GB3all 16K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB5all 16K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB10all 16K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB10all 16K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB15all 16K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB23all 16K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB44all 16K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB42all 16K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB52all 16K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified60all 16K107 GB
H200 141 GB79all 16K138 GB
B200 180 GB103all 16K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
9all 16K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
14all 16K15.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each
17.4 GB
513.9 GB
818.7 GB
1631.6 GB
3257.4 GB
64109 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat (above) ↗ 2.0BFP16 3.9 GBRTX 3060 12 GB
deepseek-vl-7b-chat ↗ 7.3BFP16 14.7 GB2× RTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What deepseek-community says about deepseek-vl

Read the model card

This is the transformers version of Deepseek-VL, a foundation model for Visual Language Modeling.

Table of Contents

Model Details

Deepseek-VL was introduced by the DeepSeek AI team. It is a vision-language model (VLM) designed to process both text and images for generating contextually relevant responses. The model leverages LLaMA as its text encoder, while SigLip is used for encoding images.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

We present DeepSeek-VL, an open-source Vision-Language (VL) Model designed for real-world vision and language understanding applications. Our approach is structured around three key dimensions: We strive to ensure our data is diverse, scalable, and extensively covers real-world scenarios including web screenshots, PDFs, OCR, charts, and knowledge-based content, aiming for a comprehensive representation of practical contexts. Further, we create a use case taxonomy from real user scenarios and construct an instruction tuning dataset accordingly. The fine-tuning with this dataset substantially improves the model's user experience in practical applications. Considering efficiency and the demands of most real-world scenarios, DeepSeek-VL incorporates a hybrid vision encoder that efficiently processes high-resolution images (1024 x 1024), while maintaining a relatively low computational overhead. This design choice ensures the model's ability to capture critical semantic and detailed information across various visual tasks. We posit that a proficient Vision-Language Model should, foremost, possess strong language abilities. To ensure the preservation of LLM capabilities during pretraining, we investigate an effective VL pretraining strategy by integrating LLM training from the beginning and carefully managing the competitive dynamics observed between vision and language modalities. The DeepSeek-VL family (both 1.3B and 7B models) showcases superior user experiences as a vision-language chatbot in real-world applications, achieving state-of-the-art or competitive performance across a wide range of visual-language benchmarks at the same model size while maintaining robust performance on language-centric benchmarks. We have made both 1.3B and 7B models publicly accessible to foster innovations based on this foundation model.

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

  • Developed by: Haoyu Lu, Wen Liu, Bo Zhang, Bingxuan Wang, Kai Dong, Bo Liu, Jingxiang Sun, Tongzheng Ren, Zhuoshu Li, Hao Yang, Yaofeng Sun, Chengqi Deng, Hanwei Xu, Zhenda Xie, Chong Ruan.
  • Model type: Deepseek-VL
  • License: deepseek

Model Sources

  • HF Docs: Deepseek-VL
  • Repository: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-VL
  • Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05525

How to Get Started with the Model

Note: Ensure you have transformers version 4.54.0 or later installed:

pip install -U "transformers>=4.54.0"

The example below demonstrates how to generate text based on an image with Pipeline.

import torch
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline(
    task="image-text-to-text",
    model="deepseek-community/deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat",
    device=0,
    torch_dtype=torch.float16
)

messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {
                "type": "image",
                "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/pipeline-cat-chonk.jpeg",
            },
            { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image."},
        ]
    }
]

pipe(text=messages, max_new_tokens=20, return_full_text=False)

Generate text based on an image with AutoModel.

import torch
from transformers import DeepseekVLForConditionalGeneration, AutoProcessor

model = DeepseekVLForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
    "deepseek-community/deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat",
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="auto",
    attn_implementation="sdpa"
)

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("deepseek-community/deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat")

messages = [
    {
        "role":"user",
        "content":[
            {
                "type":"image",
                "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/pipeline-cat-chonk.jpeg"
            },
            {
                "type":"text",
                "text":"Describe this image."
            }
        ]
    }

]

inputs = processor.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
    tokenize=True,
    return_dict=True,
    return_tensors="pt"
).to(model.device, dtype=model.dtype)

generated_ids = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=128)
generated_ids_trimmed = [
    out_ids[len(in_ids) :] for in_ids, out_ids in zip(inputs.input_ids, generated_ids)
]
output_text = processor.batch_decode(
    generated_ids_trimmed, skip_special_tokens=True, clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False
)

print(output_text)

Quantization reduces the memory burden of large models by representing the weights in a lower precision. Refer to the [Quantization](http

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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