Files
axolotl/examples/smolvlm2/README.md
Wing Lian 130ef7c51a Various fixes for VLMs (#3063)
* fix to not use batch feature indexing

* more vlm fixes

* use AutoModelForImageTextToText

* add example yaml and need num2words for chat template

* improve handling of adding image tokens to conversation

* add lfm2-vl support

* update the lfm readme

* fix markdown and add rtol for loss checks

* feat: add smolvlm2 processing strat

* fix: check for causal-conv1d in lfm models

* feat: add docs for lfm2

* feat: add new models and tips to docs

* feat: add smolvlm2 docs and remove extra dep

* chore: update docs

* feat: add video instructions

* chore: cleanup

* chore: comments

* fix: typo

* feat: add usage stats

* chore: refactor

---------

Co-authored-by: NanoCode012 <nano@axolotl.ai>
2025-08-15 10:52:57 -04:00

2.0 KiB

Finetune SmolVLM2 with Axolotl

SmolVLM2 are a family of lightweight, open-source multimodal models from HuggingFace designed to analyze and understand video, image, and text content.

These models are built for efficiency, making them well-suited for on-device applications where computational resources are limited. Models are available in multiple sizes, including 2.2B, 500M, and 256M.

This guide shows how to fine-tune SmolVLM2 models with Axolotl.

Getting Started

  1. Install Axolotl following the installation guide.

    Here is an example of how to install from pip:

    # Ensure you have a compatible version of Pytorch installed
    pip3 install packaging setuptools wheel ninja
    pip3 install --no-build-isolation 'axolotl[flash-attn]>=0.12.0'
    
  2. Install an extra dependency:

    pip3 install num2words==0.5.14
    
  3. Run the finetuning example:

    # LoRA SFT (1x48GB @ 6.8GiB)
    axolotl train examples/smolvlm2/smolvlm2-2B-lora.yaml
    

TIPS

  • Dataset Format: For video finetuning, your dataset must be compatible with the multi-content Messages format. For more details, see our documentation on Multimodal Formats.
  • Dataset Loading: Read more on how to prepare and load your own datasets in our documentation.

Optimization Guides