SmolVLM Grows Smaller – Introducing the 250M & 500M Models!
We’re excited to announce two new additions to the SmolVLM family: SmolVLM-256M and SmolVLM-500M. That’s right—256M parameters, making it the smallest Vision Language Model in the world!
We built on everything we learned from SmolVLM 2B while focusing on efficiency, data mixtures, and new design trade-offs. We are excited to introduce a pair of models that preserve strong multimodal performance in a fraction of the footprint.
This release comes with four checkpoints: two base models and two instruction fine-tuned models with sizes 256M and 500M parameters. These models can be loadable directly to transformers, MLX and ONNX, and we have demos for transformers and WebGPU (with ONNX). You can find all the models and the demo for this release here.
We're now reaching model parity with the SmolLM2 family (135M, 360M, 1.7B), so you have a complete set of smaller LLM + VLM combos to play with.
