vllm/docs/source/serving/offline_inference.md

(offline-inference)=

Offline Inference

You can run vLLM in your own code on a list of prompts.

The offline API is based on the {class}~vllm.LLM class. To initialize the vLLM engine, create a new instance of LLM and specify the model to run.

For example, the following code downloads the facebook/opt-125m model from HuggingFace and runs it in vLLM using the default configuration.

from vllm import LLM

llm = LLM(model="facebook/opt-125m")

After initializing the LLM instance, you can perform model inference using various APIs. The available APIs depend on the type of model that is being run:

• Generative models output logprobs which are sampled from to obtain the final output text.
• Pooling models output their hidden states directly.

Please refer to the above pages for more details about each API.

:::{seealso} API Reference :::

Configuration Options

This section lists the most common options for running the vLLM engine. For a full list, refer to the Engine Arguments page.

(model-resolution)=

Model resolution

vLLM loads HuggingFace-compatible models by inspecting the architectures field in config.json of the model repository and finding the corresponding implementation that is registered to vLLM. Nevertheless, our model resolution may fail for the following reasons:

• The config.json of the model repository lacks the architectures field.
• Unofficial repositories refer to a model using alternative names which are not recorded in vLLM.
• The same architecture name is used for multiple models, creating ambiguity as to which model should be loaded.

To fix this, explicitly specify the model architecture by passing config.json overrides to the hf_overrides option. For example:

from vllm import LLM

model = LLM(
    model="cerebras/Cerebras-GPT-1.3B",
    hf_overrides={"architectures": ["GPT2LMHeadModel"]},  # GPT-2
)

Our list of supported models shows the model architectures that are recognized by vLLM.

Reducing memory usage

Large models might cause your machine to run out of memory (OOM). Here are some options that help alleviate this problem.

Tensor Parallelism (TP)

Tensor parallelism (tensor_parallel_size option) can be used to split the model across multiple GPUs.

The following code splits the model across 2 GPUs.

llm = LLM(model="ibm-granite/granite-3.1-8b-instruct",
          tensor_parallel_size=2)

:::{important} To ensure that vLLM initializes CUDA correctly, you should avoid calling related functions (e.g. {func}torch.cuda.set_device) before initializing vLLM. Otherwise, you may run into an error like RuntimeError: Cannot re-initialize CUDA in forked subprocess.

To control which devices are used, please instead set the CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES environment variable. :::

Quantization

Quantized models take less memory at the cost of lower precision.

Statically quantized models can be downloaded from HF Hub (some popular ones are available at Neural Magic) and used directly without extra configuration.

Dynamic quantization is also supported via the quantization option -- see here for more details.

Context length and batch size

You can further reduce memory usage by limiting the context length of the model (max_model_len option) and the maximum batch size (max_num_seqs option).

from vllm import LLM

llm = LLM(model="adept/fuyu-8b",
          max_model_len=2048,
          max_num_seqs=2)

Adjust cache size

If you run out of CPU RAM, try the following options:

• (Multi-modal models only) you can set the size of multi-modal input cache using VLLM_MM_INPUT_CACHE_GIB environment variable (default 4 GiB).
• (CPU backend only) you can set the size of KV cache using VLLM_CPU_KVCACHE_SPACE environment variable (default 4 GiB).

Disable unused modalities

You can disable unused modalities (except for text) by setting its limit to zero.

For example, if your application only accepts image input, there is no need to allocate any memory for videos.

from vllm import LLM

# Accept images but not videos
llm = LLM(model="Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct",
          limit_mm_per_prompt={"video": 0})

You can even run a multi-modal model for text-only inference:

from vllm import LLM

# Don't accept images. Just text.
llm = LLM(model="google/gemma-3-27b-it",
          limit_mm_per_prompt={"image": 0})

Performance optimization and tuning

You can potentially improve the performance of vLLM by finetuning various options. Please refer to this guide for more details.