Model reference · open weights

deepseek-vl2-tiny

LLMs deepseek-ai Vision + text 1 build Its own licence terms 302k dl/mo

deepseek-vl2-tiny is an open-weight language model from DeepSeek. deepseek-vl2-tiny (BF16) weighs 6.7 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • DeepSeek-VL2-tiny is a Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Model developed by DeepSeek for image-text-to-text tasks.
  • It is built on the DeepSeekMoE-3B architecture and features 1.0B activated parameters.
  • The model supports commercial use under the DeepSeek Model License.

Summary of the deepseek-ai/deepseek-vl2-tiny model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byDeepSeek
Released2024-12-13
Parameters3.4B
VRAM6.7 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for deepseek-vl2-tiny (BF16)

6.7 GBweights, file size
762 MBruntime overhead, at least

How much memory each request adds isn't estimated yet for this architecture. The weights need at least the cards below, plus room for the context.

CardWeights alone
RTX 3060 12 GBfits
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits
RTX 3090 24 GBfits
RTX 4090 24 GBfits
RTX 5090 32 GBfits
L40S 48 GBfits
A100 80 GBfits
H100 80 GBfits
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits
H200 141 GBfits
B200 180 GBfits

From the model card

What DeepSeek says about deepseek-vl2-tiny

Read the model card

1. Introduction

Introducing DeepSeek-VL2, an advanced series of large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Vision-Language Models that significantly improves upon its predecessor, DeepSeek-VL. DeepSeek-VL2 demonstrates superior capabilities across various tasks, including but not limited to visual question answering, optical character recognition, document/table/chart understanding, and visual grounding. Our model series is composed of three variants: DeepSeek-VL2-Tiny, DeepSeek-VL2-Small and DeepSeek-VL2, with 1.0B, 2.8B and 4.5B activated parameters respectively. DeepSeek-VL2 achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance with similar or fewer activated parameters compared to existing open-source dense and MoE-based models.

DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding

Github Repository

Zhiyu Wu*, Xiaokang Chen*, Zizheng Pan*, Xingchao Liu*, Wen Liu**, Damai Dai, Huazuo Gao, Yiyang Ma, Chengyue Wu, Bingxuan Wang, Zhenda Xie, Yu Wu, Kai Hu, Jiawei Wang, Yaofeng Sun, Yukun Li, Yishi Piao, Kang Guan, Aixin Liu, Xin Xie, Yuxiang You, Kai Dong, Xingkai Yu, Haowei Zhang, Liang Zhao, Yisong Wang, Chong Ruan*** (* Equal Contribution, ** Project Lead, *** Corresponding author)

2. Model Summary

DeepSeek-VL2-tiny is built on DeepSeekMoE-3B (total activated parameters are 1.0B).

3. Quick Start

Installation

On the basis of Python >= 3.8 environment, install the necessary dependencies by running the following command:

pip install -e .

Notifications

  1. We suggest to use a temperature T <= 0.7 when sampling. We observe a larger temperature decreases the generation quality.
  2. To keep the number of tokens managable in the context window, we apply dynamic tiling strategy to =3 images, we directly pad the images to 384*384 as inputs without tiling.
  3. The main difference between DeepSeek-VL2-Tiny, DeepSeek-VL2-Small and DeepSeek-VL2 is the base LLM.

Simple Inference Example

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM

from deepseek_vl.models import DeepseekVLV2Processor, DeepseekVLV2ForCausalLM
from deepseek_vl.utils.io import load_pil_images

# specify the path to the model
model_path = "deepseek-ai/deepseek-vl2-small"
vl_chat_processor: DeepseekVLV2Processor = DeepseekVLV2Processor.from_pretrained(model_path)
tokenizer = vl_chat_processor.tokenizer

vl_gpt: DeepseekVLV2ForCausalLM = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_path, trust_remote_code=True)
vl_gpt = vl_gpt.to(torch.bfloat16).cuda().eval()

## single image conversation example
conversation = [
    {
        "role": "",
        "content": "\nThe giraffe at the back..",
        "images": ["./images/visual_grounding.jpeg"],
    },
    {"role": "", "content": ""},
]

## multiple images (or in-context learning) conversation example
# conversation = [
#     {
#         "role": "User",
#         "content": "A dog wearing nothing in the foreground, "
#                    "a dog wearing a santa hat, "
#                    "a dog wearing a wizard outfit, and "
#                    "what's the dog wearing?",
#         "images": [
#             "images/dog_a.png",
#             "images/dog_b.png",
#             "images/dog_c.png",
#             "images/dog_d.png",
#         ],
#     },
#     {"role": "Assistant", "content": ""}
# ]

# load images and prepare for inputs
pil_images = load_pil_images(conversation)
prepare_inputs = vl_chat_processor(
    conversations=conversation,
    images=pil_images,
    force_batchify=True,
    system_prompt=""
).to(vl_gpt.device)

# run image encoder to get the image embeddings
inputs_embeds = vl_gpt.prepare_inputs_embeds(**prepare_inputs)

# run the model to get the response
outputs = vl_gpt.language_model.generate(
    inputs_embeds=inputs_embeds,
    attention_mask=prepare_inputs.attention_mask,
    pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    bos_token_id=tokenizer.bos_token_id,
    eos_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    max_new_tokens=512,
    do_sample=False,
    use_cache=True
)

answer = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0].cpu().tolist(), skip_special_tokens=True)
print(f"{prepare_inputs['sft_format'][0]}", answer)

Gradio Demo (TODO)

4. License

This code repository is licensed under MIT License. The use of DeepSeek-VL2 models is subject to DeepSeek Model License. DeepSeek-VL2 series supports commercial use.

5. Citation

@misc{wu2024deepseekvl2mixtureofexpertsvisionlanguagemodels,
      title={DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding},
      author={Zhiyu Wu and Xiaokang Chen and Zizheng Pan and Xingchao Liu and Wen Liu and Damai Dai and Huazuo Gao and Yiyang Ma and Chengyue Wu and Bingxuan Wang and Zhenda Xie and Yu Wu and Kai Hu and Jiawei Wang and Yaofeng Sun and Yukun Li and Yishi Piao and Kang Guan and Aixin Liu and Xin Xie and Yuxiang You and Kai Dong and Xingkai Yu and Haowei Zhang and Liang Zhao and Yisong Wang and Chong Ruan},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2412.10302},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10302},
}

6. Contact

If you have any questions, please raise an issue or contact us at service@deepseek.com.

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

How it works

How language models work

Your prompttext / messagesTransformerattention over tokensNext-token loopgenerate + streamResponsetext · tool callsA language model reads your tokens and predicts the next one, again and again, streaming the reply back.
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