inference/research
verifiedhigh · 0.90updated 2026-10-04

Molmo-7B-D-0924

dense 8.021B

Fields

id
models/molmo-7b-d
Family
molmo
Vendor
Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)
Release year
2024
Architecture
dense
Params (B)
8.021
Active params (B)
8.021
Hidden size
3,584
Layers
28
KV heads
4
Head dim
128
GQA ratio
7
Max context
4,096
Context scaling method
native
Activation
silu
Attention variant
GQA
KV cache (bytes/token)
57,344
FLOPs per active token
16,042,000,000
Open weights
yes
License
apache-2.0
notes
CONTEXT SCALING: null is a VERIFIED value, checked against config rather than left blank. config.json declares rope_scaling null, rope_theta 1000000, max_position_embeddings 4096. TWO-PART MODEL, notable for the 2D POOLING innovation. (1) Vision: OpenAI CLIP-style ViT-L/14. The published config.json OMITS the vision_backbone block entirely; these dims come from the VisionBackboneConfig dataclass defaults in modeling_molmo.py shipped in the same repo: image_default_input_size 336x336, image_patch_size 14, image_emb_dim 1024, image_num_heads 16, image_head_dim 64, image_mlp_dim 4096, gelu. So a 336x336 crop = (336/14)^2 = 576 ViT patches. THE INNOVATION: image_pooling_h 2, image_pooling_w 2, image_pooling_2d 'attention'. Molmo does not pixel-shuffle or average-pool -- it runs a learned MultiHeadDotProductAttention over each 2x2 spatial neighbourhood (MultiHeadAttentionPool, with 'attention_2wide' and 'attention_v2' variants also implemented). The projector is a 2-layer MLP (image_projector 'mlp'). Result: 576 patches -> 144 LLM tokens per crop, a 4x reduction that is content-adaptive rather than a fixed reshape. (2) LLM: OLMo-style dense decoder, 28 layers, hidden 3584, 28 heads / 4 KV, head_dim 128, intermediate 37888, qkv_bias true, max_position 4096, rope_theta 1e6, vocab 152,064. ARCHITECTURE = dense. DOMINANCE: the efficient default is a single 336x336 crop = 144 vision tokens, which is TINY -- text dominates prefill for the default single-crop path (unlike every other VLM in this slice). Molmo also supports multi-crop, where dominance flips to vision. KV CACHE: 28 * 4 * 128 * 2 * 2 = 57,344 B/token. max_position_embeddings is only 4096, so resident KV caps at 224 MiB/sequence -- Molmo is a short-context model by design. params_b 8.021 = HF API safetensors total (8,021,025,280). SERVICEABILITY JOIN (added 2026-10-03; the architecture x engine matrix this record was missing, with a citation per cell in docs/13-model-compatibility.md): FAMILY=multimodal. REQUIRED KERNEL CLASS: an encoder tower (ViT / SigLIP / ConvNet / audio encoder) running on a SEPARATE schedule from the decoder, plus a projector into the decoder's embedding space, plus - for the mrope and DeepStack families - a multi-axis rotary scheme in the decoder rather than plain 1-D RoPE. Three engine-side consequences, all cited. (1) The encoder tower is a separate compute path, so its throughput is a different problem from decode throughput and engines that disclaim encoder throughput are disclaiming this. vLLM says so in its own words: 'We currently support pooling models primarily for convenience. This is not guaranteed to provide any performance improvements over using Hugging Face Transformers or Sentence Transformers directly' [[vllm-pooling-models]] - that is the general statement this class inherits. TRT-LLM's answer is a documented mechanism: a Multimodal Encoder Side Stream that prefetches encoder work on a separate CUDA stream plus a per-model Multimodal Embeddings Cache, currently available only for seven architectures (Gemma4, Gemma4Unified, Mistral3, Qwen3VL, Qwen3VLMoe, Qwen3_5, Qwen3_5Moe) [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. (2) Several towers carry hard external dependencies: Gemma3nForConditionalGeneration 'depends on timm>=1.0.17 to make use of its MobileNet-v5 vision backbone' and 'is only supported on V1 due to shared KV caching' [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]; MiniCPM-V 4.6 requires transformers>=5.7.0 because it was upstreamed as a native model type [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. (3) Hybrid-only multimodal models expose a memory knob unique to this class: vLLM's --language-model-only flag sets all supported multimodal modalities to 0 so the multimodal modules are not loaded, 'to free up more GPU memory for KV cache' for Llama-4, Step3, Mistral-3 and Qwen-3.5 [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]].SUPPORTED BY (cited): vLLM native rows include InternVLChatModel and InternVLForConditionalGeneration, LlavaOnevisionForConditionalGeneration, LlavaNextForConditionalGeneration, MolmoForCausalLM and Molmo2ForConditionalGeneration, PaliGemmaForConditionalGeneration, SmolVLMForConditionalGeneration, Glm4vForConditionalGeneration, Qwen2VL/Qwen3VL, MiniCPMV, Mllama, Phi4MM, Gemma4, NemotronH_Nano_VL_V2, VoxtralForConditionalGeneration (which requires mistral-common[audio]) and Qwen3OmniMoeThinkerForConditionalGeneration [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]. SGLang's multimodal table covers InternLM2-VL, LLaVA-OneVision, LLaVA-NeXT(-Video), Ling-3.0-flash-VL, LFM2.5-VL, MiniCPM-V-2, GLM-4.5V, GLM-OCR, Qwen3-VL 235B-A22B and 30B-A3B, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B, Kimi-VL-A3B, MiMo-VL-7B-RL, Step3-VL-10B, dots.ocr, PaddleOCR-VL, Cosmos3, deepseek-vl2, Janus-Pro-7B, NVILA-8B and gemma-3-4b-it, plus openai/whisper-large-v3 and Qwen3-ASR-1.7B on the audio route [[mdl2-sglang-multimodal-language-models]]. TRT-LLM's multimodal matrix covers a narrower set with an explicit per-row modality string and per-row Untested cells [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. Older GGUF-side engines reach the class through llama.cpp's projector graph, which llama.cpp-embedding-server states it cannot serve on the embedding route [[llama-cpp-embedding-server]]. PER-MODALITY CAVEATS CITED: TRT-LLM marks Gemma4Unified and MiniCPM-V 4.6 Untested for CUDA Graph / chunked prefill, MiniMax-M3 Untested for attention DP and KV cache reuse, Qwen4Exp Untested across the board, and notes audio requires a checkpoint with a sound_config and is supported only on the full non-disaggregated path [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. Step-3.7's vision tower runs in BF16 even when the text decoder is quantized [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]] - a precision asymmetry that silently costs memory. vLLM's fallback path accepts image inputs only, with video 'to be added in a future release' [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]].

Notes

CONTEXT SCALING: null is a VERIFIED value, checked against config rather than left blank. config.json declares rope_scaling null, rope_theta 1000000, max_position_embeddings 4096. TWO-PART MODEL, notable for the 2D POOLING innovation. (1) Vision: OpenAI CLIP-style ViT-L/14. The published config.json OMITS the vision_backbone block entirely; these dims come from the VisionBackboneConfig dataclass defaults in modeling_molmo.py shipped in the same repo: image_default_input_size 336x336, image_patch_size 14, image_emb_dim 1024, image_num_heads 16, image_head_dim 64, image_mlp_dim 4096, gelu. So a 336x336 crop = (336/14)^2 = 576 ViT patches. THE INNOVATION: image_pooling_h 2, image_pooling_w 2, image_pooling_2d 'attention'. Molmo does not pixel-shuffle or average-pool -- it runs a learned MultiHeadDotProductAttention over each 2x2 spatial neighbourhood (MultiHeadAttentionPool, with 'attention_2wide' and 'attention_v2' variants also implemented). The projector is a 2-layer MLP (image_projector 'mlp'). Result: 576 patches -> 144 LLM tokens per crop, a 4x reduction that is content-adaptive rather than a fixed reshape. (2) LLM: OLMo-style dense decoder, 28 layers, hidden 3584, 28 heads / 4 KV, head_dim 128, intermediate 37888, qkv_bias true, max_position 4096, rope_theta 1e6, vocab 152,064. ARCHITECTURE = dense. DOMINANCE: the efficient default is a single 336x336 crop = 144 vision tokens, which is TINY -- text dominates prefill for the default single-crop path (unlike every other VLM in this slice). Molmo also supports multi-crop, where dominance flips to vision. KV CACHE: 28 * 4 * 128 * 2 * 2 = 57,344 B/token. max_position_embeddings is only 4096, so resident KV caps at 224 MiB/sequence -- Molmo is a short-context model by design. params_b 8.021 = HF API safetensors total (8,021,025,280).

SERVICEABILITY JOIN (added 2026-10-03; the architecture x engine matrix this record was missing, with a citation per cell in docs/13-model-compatibility.md): FAMILY=multimodal. REQUIRED KERNEL CLASS: an encoder tower (ViT / SigLIP / ConvNet / audio encoder) running on a SEPARATE schedule from the decoder, plus a projector into the decoder's embedding space, plus - for the mrope and DeepStack families - a multi-axis rotary scheme in the decoder rather than plain 1-D RoPE. Three engine-side consequences, all cited. (1) The encoder tower is a separate compute path, so its throughput is a different problem from decode throughput and engines that disclaim encoder throughput are disclaiming this. vLLM says so in its own words: 'We currently support pooling models primarily for convenience. This is not guaranteed to provide any performance improvements over using Hugging Face Transformers or Sentence Transformers directly' [[vllm-pooling-models]] - that is the general statement this class inherits. TRT-LLM's answer is a documented mechanism: a Multimodal Encoder Side Stream that prefetches encoder work on a separate CUDA stream plus a per-model Multimodal Embeddings Cache, currently available only for seven architectures (Gemma4, Gemma4Unified, Mistral3, Qwen3VL, Qwen3VLMoe, Qwen3_5, Qwen3_5Moe) [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. (2) Several towers carry hard external dependencies: Gemma3nForConditionalGeneration 'depends on timm>=1.0.17 to make use of its MobileNet-v5 vision backbone' and 'is only supported on V1 due to shared KV caching' [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]; MiniCPM-V 4.6 requires transformers>=5.7.0 because it was upstreamed as a native model type [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. (3) Hybrid-only multimodal models expose a memory knob unique to this class: vLLM's --language-model-only flag sets all supported multimodal modalities to 0 so the multimodal modules are not loaded, 'to free up more GPU memory for KV cache' for Llama-4, Step3, Mistral-3 and Qwen-3.5 [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]].SUPPORTED BY (cited): vLLM native rows include InternVLChatModel and InternVLForConditionalGeneration, LlavaOnevisionForConditionalGeneration, LlavaNextForConditionalGeneration, MolmoForCausalLM and Molmo2ForConditionalGeneration, PaliGemmaForConditionalGeneration, SmolVLMForConditionalGeneration, Glm4vForConditionalGeneration, Qwen2VL/Qwen3VL, MiniCPMV, Mllama, Phi4MM, Gemma4, NemotronH_Nano_VL_V2, VoxtralForConditionalGeneration (which requires mistral-common[audio]) and Qwen3OmniMoeThinkerForConditionalGeneration [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]. SGLang's multimodal table covers InternLM2-VL, LLaVA-OneVision, LLaVA-NeXT(-Video), Ling-3.0-flash-VL, LFM2.5-VL, MiniCPM-V-2, GLM-4.5V, GLM-OCR, Qwen3-VL 235B-A22B and 30B-A3B, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B, Kimi-VL-A3B, MiMo-VL-7B-RL, Step3-VL-10B, dots.ocr, PaddleOCR-VL, Cosmos3, deepseek-vl2, Janus-Pro-7B, NVILA-8B and gemma-3-4b-it, plus openai/whisper-large-v3 and Qwen3-ASR-1.7B on the audio route [[mdl2-sglang-multimodal-language-models]]. TRT-LLM's multimodal matrix covers a narrower set with an explicit per-row modality string and per-row Untested cells [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. Older GGUF-side engines reach the class through llama.cpp's projector graph, which llama.cpp-embedding-server states it cannot serve on the embedding route [[llama-cpp-embedding-server]]. PER-MODALITY CAVEATS CITED: TRT-LLM marks Gemma4Unified and MiniCPM-V 4.6 Untested for CUDA Graph / chunked prefill, MiniMax-M3 Untested for attention DP and KV cache reuse, Qwen4Exp Untested across the board, and notes audio requires a checkpoint with a sound_config and is supported only on the full non-disaggregated path [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. Step-3.7's vision tower runs in BF16 even when the text decoder is quantized [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]] - a precision asymmetry that silently costs memory. vLLM's fallback path accepts image inputs only, with video 'to be added in a future release' [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]].

Cross-references

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