Model reference · open weights

Emu3

LLMs BAAI Vision + text 1 build Open weights 42k dl/mo

Emu3 is an open-weight language model from BAAI. Emu3-Chat-hf (FP32) weighs 17.5 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 4090 24 GB.

  • Emu3 is an open-source multimodal model developed by BAAI that uses next-token prediction to handle image-text-to-text tasks.
  • The model features 8.8B parameters and supports English, allowing it to generate images and videos while providing vision-language understanding without relying on CLIP or a pretrained LLM.
  • It is released under the apache-2.0 license.

Summary of the BAAI/Emu3-Chat-hf model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byBAAI
Released2024-10-24
Parameters8.8B
VRAM17.5 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Emu3-Chat-hf (FP32)

17.5 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 GB … RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
2 smaller cards
does not fit
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 BAAI says about Emu3

Read the model card

Emu3 Team, BAAI

Below is the model card of Emu3-Chat model, which is adapted from the original Emu3 model card that you can find here.

Model details

Model type: Emu3 is an open-source multimodal models trained with next-token prediction task. By tokenizing images and text into a discrete space, Emu3 is trained as a single transformer from scratch on a mixture of multimodal sequences. It is an auto-regressive language model, based on the transformer architecture.

Paper or resources for more information: https://github.com/baaivision/Emu3

Highlights

  • Emu3 is capable of generating high-quality images following the text input, by simply predicting the next vision token. The model naturally supports flexible resolutions and styles.
  • Emu3 shows strong vision-language understanding capabilities to see the physical world and provides coherent text responses. Notably, this capability is achieved without depending on a CLIP and a pretrained LLM.
  • Emu3 simply generates a video causally by predicting the next token in a video sequence, unlike the video diffusion model as in Sora. With a video in context, Emu3 can also naturally extend the video and predict what will happen next.
  • Emu3 outperforms several well-established task-specific models in both generation and perception tasks, surpassing flagship open models such as SDXL, LLaVA-1.6 and OpenSora-1.2, while eliminating the need for diffusion or compositional architectures.

How to use the model

First, make sure to have transformers >= 4.48.0. Make sure also to follow the correct prompt template (USER: xxxASSISTANT:) and add the token `` to the location where you want to query images:

Using pipeline:

from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="BAAI/Emu3-Chat-hf")
messages = [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": [
          {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/transformers/tasks/ai2d-demo.jpg"},
          {"type": "text", "text": "What does the label 15 represent? (1) lava (2) core (3) tunnel (4) ash cloud"},
        ],
    },
]

out = pipe(text=messages, max_new_tokens=20)
print(out)
>>> [{'input_text': [{'role': 'user', 'content': [{'type': 'image', 'url': 'https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/transformers/tasks/ai2d-demo.jpg'}, {'type': 'text', 'text': 'What does the label 15 represent? (1) lava (2) core (3) tunnel (4) ash cloud'}]}], 'generated_text': 'Lava'}]

Using pure transformers:

Below is an example script to run generation in float16 precision on a GPU device:

import requests
from PIL import Image

import torch
from transformers import AutoProcessor, Emu3ForConditionalGeneration

model_id = "BAAI/Emu3-Chat-hf"
model = Emu3ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
    model_id,
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    low_cpu_mem_usage=True,
    device_map="cuda:0",
)

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)

# Define a chat history and use `apply_chat_template` to get correctly formatted prompt
# Each value in "content" has to be a list of dicts with types ("text", "image")
conversation = [
    {

      "role": "user",
      "content": [
          {"type": "image", "url": "http://images.cocodataset.org/val2017/000000039769.jpg"},
          {"type": "text", "text": "What are these?"},
        ],
    },
]
inputs_dict = processor.apply_chat_template(conversation, add_generation_prompt=True, tokenize=True, return_dict=True)
inputs_dict = inputs_dict.to(0, torch.float16)

output = model.generate(**inputs_dict, max_new_tokens=50, do_sample=False)
print(processor.decode(output[0][2:], skip_special_tokens=True))

Model optimization

Use Flash-Attention 2 to further speed-up generation

First make sure to install flash-attn. Refer to the original repository of Flash Attention regarding that package installation. Simply change the snippet above with:

model = Emu3ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
    model_id,
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    low_cpu_mem_usage=True,
+   attn_implementation="flash_attention_2",
    device_map="cuda:0",
)

Citation

@misc{wang2024emu3nexttokenpredictionneed,
      title={Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need},
      author={Xinlong Wang and Xiaosong Zhang and Zhengxiong Luo and Quan Sun and Yufeng Cui and Jinsheng Wang and Fan Zhang and Yueze Wang and Zhen Li and Qiying Yu and Yingli Zhao and Yulong Ao and Xuebin Min and Tao Li and Boya Wu and Bo Zhao and Bowen Zhang and Liangdong Wang and Guang Liu and Zheqi He and Xi Yang and Jingjing Liu and Yonghua Lin and Tiejun Huang and Zhongyuan Wang},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2409.18869},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18869},
}

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

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