KIMI-VL TECHNICAL REPORT

Tech Report | HuggingFace

Introduction

We present Kimi-VL, an efficient open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) vision-language model (VLM) that offers advanced multimodal reasoning, long-context understanding, and strong agent capabilities—all while activating only 2.8B parameters in its language decoder (Kimi-VL-A3B).

Kimi-VL demonstrates strong performance across challenging domains: as a general-purpose VLM, Kimi-VL excels in multi-turn agent interaction tasks (e.g.,OSWorld), achieving state-of-the-art results comparable to flagship models. Furthermore, it exhibits remarkable capabilities across diverse challenging vision language tasks, including college-level image and video comprehension, optical character recognition (OCR), mathematical reasoning, multi-image understanding, and etc.

In comparative evaluations, it effectively competes with cutting-edge efficient VLMs such as GPT-4o-mini, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, and Gemma-3-12B-IT, while surpassing GPT-4o in several specialized domains.

Kimi-VL also advances the pareto frontiers of multimodal models in processing long contexts and perceiving clearly: Equipped with a 128K extended context window, Kimi-VL can processes long and diverse inputs, achieving impressive scores of 64.5 on LongVideoBench, and 35.1 on MMLongBench-Doc; Its native-resolution vision encoder, MoonViT, further allows it to see and understand ultra-high-resolution visual inputs, achieving 83.2 on InfoVQA and 34.5 on ScreenSpot-Pro, while maintaining lower computational cost with common visual inputs and general tasks.

Building on this foundation, we introduce an advanced long-thinking variant: Kimi-VL-Thinking. Developed through long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), this model exhibits strong long-horizon reasoning capabilities. It achieves scores of 61.7 on MMMU, 36.8 on MathVision, and 71.3 on MathVista while maintaining the compact 2.8B activated LLM parameter footprint, setting a new standard for efficient yet capable multimodal thinking models.

Architecture

The model adopts an MoE language model, a native-resolution visual encoder (MoonViT), and an MLP projector, as illustrated in the following image.

Model Variants

🤗 For general multimodal perception and understanding, OCR, long video and long document, video perception, and agent uses, we recommend Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct for efficient inference; for advanced text and multimodal reasoning (e.g. math), please consider using Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking.

Model	#Total Params	#Activated Params	Context Length	Download Link
Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct	16B	3B	128K	🤗 Hugging Face
Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking	16B	3B	128K	🤗 Hugging Face

Performance

As an efficient model, Kimi-VL can robustly handle diverse tasks (fine-grained perception, math, college-level problems, OCR, agent, etc) across a broad spectrum of input forms (single-image, multi-image, video, long-document, etc).

A brief comparison with existing 10B-level dense VLMs and DeepSeek-VL2 (A4.5B):

With effective long-thinking abilitites, Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking can match the performance of 30B/70B frontier open-source VLMs on MathVision benchmark:

Example usage

Setup

conda create -n kimi-vl python=3.10 -y
conda activate kimi-vl
pip install -r requirements.txt

Model Download

Model	#Total Params	#Activated Params	Context Length	Download Link
Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct	16B	3B	128K	🤗 Hugging Face
Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking	16B	3B	128K	🤗 Hugging Face

Inference with Hugging Face Transformers

We introduce how to use our model at inference stage using transformers library. It is recommended to use python=3.10, torch>=2.1.0, and transformers=4.48.2 as the development environment.

Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct:

from PIL import Image
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoProcessor

model_path = "moonshotai/Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct"
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_path,
    torch_dtype="auto",
    device_map="auto",
    trust_remote_code=True,
)
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_path, trust_remote_code=True)

image_path = "./figures/demo.png"
image = Image.open(image_path)
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": [{"type": "image", "image": image_path}, {"type": "text", "text": "What is the dome building in the picture? Think step by step."}]}
]
text = processor.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt")
inputs = processor(images=image, text=text, return_tensors="pt", padding=True, truncation=True).to(model.device)
generated_ids = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=512)
generated_ids_trimmed = [
    out_ids[len(in_ids) :] for in_ids, out_ids in zip(inputs.input_ids, generated_ids)
]
response = processor.batch_decode(
    generated_ids_trimmed, skip_special_tokens=True, clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False
)[0]
print(response)

Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking:

from PIL import Image
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoProcessor

model_path = "moonshotai/Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking"
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_path,
    torch_dtype="auto",
    device_map="auto",
    trust_remote_code=True,
)
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_path, trust_remote_code=True)

image_paths = ["./figures/demo1.png", "./figures/demo2.png"]
images = [Image.open(path) for path in image_paths]
messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image", "image": image_path} for image_path in image_paths
        ] + [{"type": "text", "text": "Please infer step by step who this manuscript belongs to and what it records"}],
    },
]
text = processor.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt")
inputs = processor(images=images, text=text, return_tensors="pt", padding=True, truncation=True).to(model.device)
generated_ids = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=2048)
generated_ids_trimmed = [
    out_ids[len(in_ids) :] for in_ids, out_ids in zip(inputs.input_ids, generated_ids)
]
response = processor.batch_decode(
    generated_ids_trimmed, skip_special_tokens=True, clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False
)[0]
print(response)

Inference with vLLM

Coming soon!