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nanoVLM - AI Vision Models Tool

Overview

nanoVLM is an open-source, lightweight repository for training and fine-tuning small vision–language models using pure PyTorch. The project is designed for researchers and engineers who need a compact, easy-to-read codebase that emphasizes fast training loops, small-footprint model variants, and reproducible recipes for common V+L tasks. According to the GitHub repository, nanoVLM focuses on providing a minimal, modular implementation that lowers the barrier to experimenting with vision-language model architectures and task-specific fine-tuning. The codebase includes training and evaluation utilities, data preprocessing helpers, and example scripts to get started quickly with tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. Because it targets small models and efficient training, nanoVLM is suitable for rapid iteration, academic prototyping, and deployment scenarios where compute or memory is constrained. The repository also serves as a reference implementation for people who want a PyTorch-native, lightweight alternative to larger multi-framework V+L toolkits.

Installation

Install via pip:

git clone https://github.com/huggingface/nanoVLM.git
cd nanoVLM
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .

Key Features

  • Pure PyTorch implementation with a compact, easy-to-read codebase for V+L research and prototyping
  • Training and fine-tuning recipes for common vision–language tasks (e.g., VQA, image captioning)
  • Modular model components enabling quick swaps of vision/text backbones and attention layers
  • Data preprocessing and dataset utilities to streamline loading and preparing V+L datasets
  • Lightweight design prioritized for fast experimentation and low-memory training on smaller hardware

Community

nanoVLM is hosted as an open-source GitHub repository where users can file issues, submit pull requests, and follow project development. The codebase is intended for community contributions and discussion via the repository’s issues and PR workflow. As part of the broader Hugging Face ecosystem, users often reference the project in community forums and Hugging Face channels for integration questions, troubleshooting, and model-sharing guidance.

Last Refreshed: 2026-01-09

Key Information

  • Category: Vision Models
  • Type: AI Vision Models Tool
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