Loading a quantized checkpoint allocates far more than the weights occupy.
`_process_gptq_weights_w4a8` unpacks 4-bit codes to int32 -- four bytes per
weight -- permutes, repacks, and drops the intermediates. For a 1.7 B model
that is gigabytes of short-lived allocation, correctly freed, and still
resident afterwards because a caching allocator keeps the arenas.
Measured on Spark-X2.5-1.7B, anonymous RSS:
path after load after release freed
W4A8 (GPTQ) 7338 MB 3510 MB 3828 MB (-52%)
W4A16 (tinygemm) 5023 MB 3411 MB 1612 MB
The second column is the more useful finding: after the release both paths
land in the same place, so W4A8's apparent 2.3 GB penalty over W4A16 was never
a footprint difference -- it was the repack. W4A8 is therefore faster *and*
level on memory, and fidelity is the only remaining reason to pick W4A16.
Hooked to CPUWorker.load_model and compile_or_warm_up_model, since those churn
separately; `VLLM_OMNI_CPU_RELEASE_MEMORY=0` disables it. CPU only: on GPU the
weights are in device memory and host churn constrains nothing.
`anon_rss_bytes()` ships alongside because the metric matters as much as the
fix. VmRSS counts the mmap'd checkpoint's file pages and moved 1.2-2.0 GB
between *identical* runs on this host; RssAnon repeats to within 0.5 MB. An
earlier claim in this tree that KV sizing saved 3.1 GB came from reading VmRSS
across a comparison that also changed the model file; re-measured on RssAnon,
shrinking the KV cache 32x is worth 188 MB, because its pages are never
touched. The analysis note is corrected accordingly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Easy, fast, and cheap omni-modality model serving for everyone
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Latest News 🔥
- [2026/08] We released 0.28.0, featuring production-ready MiniMax H3 serving on GPU and NPU, a unified AR/DiT paged KV cache runtime, and enhanced realtime full-duplex serving for the MiniCPM-o series.
- [2026/08] VeRL-Omni
v0.2.0is released: faster diffusion RL powered by vLLM-Omni (request-level/step-wise batching with FA3), rebuilt Qwen3-Omni multimodal training (DPO & GSPO), plus LTX-2.3, Qwen-Image-Edit support and more. See the release notes. - [2026/08] We released 0.26.0 - aligned with the vLLM 0.26 release line, featuring MiniMax H3 joint video/audio generation, an experimental full-duplex realtime runtime for MiniCPM-o 4.5, distributed layerwise diffusion offload, and broader model, hardware, streaming, TTS, and quantization support.
- [2026/07] We released 0.24.0 - aligned with the vLLM 0.24 release line, expanding production-ready coverage across TTS, speech, diffusion, image/video generation, and robot-policy serving, with major Omni stage runtime refactoring, diffusion request-level batching, async output materialization, quantization/cache/memory improvements, and broad CUDA/ROCm/XPU/NPU support.
- [2026/06] Starting with 0.14.0, vLLM-Omni publishes a stable release aligned with every even-numbered upstream vLLM minor version. 0.16.0, 0.18.0, 0.20.0, and 0.22.0 continued this cadence, expanding omni and world-model support with NVIDIA Cosmos3 and DreamZero, adding models such as MiniCPM-o 4.5, MOSS-TTS, and Lance, and advancing TTS, diffusion, distributed execution, quantization, RL integration through VeRL-Omni, and CUDA/ROCm/MUSA/NPU/XPU coverage.
- [2026/03] Check out our first public project deepdive at the vLLM Hong Kong Meetup!
- [2025/11] vLLM community officially released vllm-project/vllm-omni in order to support omni-modality models serving.
About
vLLM was originally designed to support large language models for text-based autoregressive generation tasks. vLLM-Omni is a framework that extends its support for omni-modality model inference and serving:
- Omni-modality: Text, image, audio, video, and action data processing
- Non-autoregressive Architectures: extend the AR support of vLLM to Diffusion Transformers (DiT) and other parallel generation models
- Heterogeneous outputs: from traditional text generation to multimodal and action outputs
vLLM-Omni is fast with:
- State-of-the-art AR support by leveraging efficient KV cache management from vLLM
- Pipelined stage execution overlapping for high throughput performance
- Fully disaggregation based on OmniConnector and dynamic resource allocation across stages
vLLM-Omni is flexible and easy to use with:
- Heterogeneous pipeline abstraction to manage complex model workflows
- Seamless integration with popular Hugging Face models
- Tensor, pipeline, data and expert parallelism support for distributed inference
- Streaming outputs
- OpenAI-compatible API server
- Full-duplex realtime serving with streaming audio input and output
vLLM-Omni seamlessly supports most popular open-source models on HuggingFace, including:
- Omni-modality models (e.g. Qwen3-Omni, MiniCPM-o 4.5, Cosmos3, HunyuanImage, BAGEL)
- TTS models (e.g. Qwen3-TTS, IndexTTS 2.5, dots.tts, CosyVoice3)
- Diffusion models — image, video, and audio generation (e.g. MiniMax H3, LTX-2.5, SANA-Video, Wan2.2)
- Robot-policy and action models (e.g. π0, GR00T-N1.7, DreamZero-DROID, InternVLA-A1)
Getting Started
Visit our documentation to learn more.
- Installation
- Quickstart
- Nightly CUDA Docker images built from the latest
main - List of Supported Models
- Deployment Recipes for vLLM-Omni model serving
Contributing
We welcome and value any contributions and collaborations. Please check out Contributing to vLLM-Omni for how to get involved.
Citation
If you use vLLM-Omni for your research, please cite our paper:
@article{yin2026vllmomni,
title={vLLM-Omni: Fully Disaggregated Serving for Any-to-Any Multimodal Models},
author={Peiqi Yin, Jiangyun Zhu, Han Gao, Chenguang Zheng, Yongxiang Huang, Taichang Zhou, Ruirui Yang, Weizhi Liu, Weiqing Chen, Canlin Guo, Didan Deng, Zifeng Mo, Cong Wang, James Cheng, Roger Wang, Hongsheng Liu},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.02204},
year={2026}
}
Join the Community
Feel free to ask questions, provide feedbacks and discuss with fellow users of vLLM-Omni in #sig-omni slack channel at slack.vllm.ai or vLLM user forum at discuss.vllm.ai.
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License
Apache License 2.0, as found in the LICENSE file.

