Model reference · open weights
vit-gpt2-image-captioning is an open-weight language model from nlpconnect. vit-gpt2-image-captioning (BF16) weighs 982 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
vit-gpt2-image-captioning is an image-to-text model developed by nlpconnect for generating captions from images. It utilizes a ViT encoder and GPT-2 decoder architecture, serving as a PyTorch version of a Flax checkpoint originally trained by ydshieh. The model is released under the Apache-2.0 license.
Summary of the nlpconnect/vit-gpt2-image-captioning model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | nlpconnect |
|---|---|
| Type | Language models |
| Task | Image→text |
| Runs with | transformers |
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| Popularity | 102k downloads / month |
| Weights | 982 MB (vit-gpt2-image-captioning (BF16), file size) |
| Licence | Open weights |
What it runs on
Weights 982 MB (file size) · runtime overhead from 762 MB on a small card.
How much memory each request adds is not estimated yet for this architecture — only the weights are. They need the cards below at the least, plus room for the context.
| Card | The weights alone |
|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits |
| L40S 48 GB | fits |
| A100 80 GB | fits |
| H100 80 GB | fits |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits |
| H200 141 GB | fits |
| B200 180 GB | fits |
From the model card
This is an image captioning model trained by @ydshieh in flax this is pytorch version of this.
from transformers import VisionEncoderDecoderModel, ViTImageProcessor, AutoTokenizer
import torch
from PIL import Image
model = VisionEncoderDecoderModel.from_pretrained("nlpconnect/vit-gpt2-image-captioning")
feature_extractor = ViTImageProcessor.from_pretrained("nlpconnect/vit-gpt2-image-captioning")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("nlpconnect/vit-gpt2-image-captioning")
device = torch.device("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")
model.to(device)
max_length = 16
num_beams = 4
gen_kwargs = {"max_length": max_length, "num_beams": num_beams}
def predict_step(image_paths):
images = []
for image_path in image_paths:
i_image = Image.open(image_path)
if i_image.mode != "RGB":
i_image = i_image.convert(mode="RGB")
images.append(i_image)
pixel_values = feature_extractor(images=images, return_tensors="pt").pixel_values
pixel_values = pixel_values.to(device)
output_ids = model.generate(pixel_values, **gen_kwargs)
preds = tokenizer.batch_decode(output_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)
preds = [pred.strip() for pred in preds]
return preds
predict_step(['doctor.e16ba4e4.jpg']) # ['a woman in a hospital bed with a woman in a hospital bed']
from transformers import pipeline
image_to_text = pipeline("image-to-text", model="nlpconnect/vit-gpt2-image-captioning")
image_to_text("https://ankur3107.github.io/assets/images/image-captioning-example.png")
# [{'generated_text': 'a soccer game with a player jumping to catch the ball '}]
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face — the full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.