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Vision-language chat: VQA, captioning, image dialogue.

Skill metadata

Reference: full SKILL.md

The following is the complete skill definition that Mibyan loads when this skill is triggered. This is what the agent sees as instructions when the skill is active.

LLaVA - Large Language and Vision Assistant

Open-source vision-language model for conversational image understanding.

When to use LLaVA

Use when:
  • Building vision-language chatbots
  • Visual question answering (VQA)
  • Image description and captioning
  • Multi-turn image conversations
  • Visual instruction following
  • Document understanding with images
Metrics:
  • 23,000+ GitHub stars
  • GPT-4V level capabilities (targeted)
  • Apache 2.0 License
  • Multiple model sizes (7B-34B params)
Use alternatives instead:
  • GPT-4V: Highest quality, API-based
  • CLIP: Simple zero-shot classification
  • BLIP-2: Better for captioning only
  • Flamingo: Research, not open-source

Quick start

Installation

Basic usage

Available models

CLI usage

Web UI (Gradio)

Multi-turn conversations

Common tasks

Image captioning

Visual question answering

Object detection (textual)

Scene understanding

Document understanding

Training custom model

Quantization (reduce VRAM)

Best practices

  1. Start with 7B model - Good quality, manageable VRAM
  2. Use 4-bit quantization - Reduces VRAM significantly
  3. GPU required - CPU inference extremely slow
  4. Clear prompts - Specific questions get better answers
  5. Multi-turn conversations - Maintain conversation context
  6. Temperature 0.2-0.7 - Balance creativity/consistency
  7. max_new_tokens 512-1024 - For detailed responses
  8. Batch processing - Process multiple images sequentially

Performance

On A100 GPU

Benchmarks

LLaVA achieves competitive scores on:
  • VQAv2: 78.5%
  • GQA: 62.0%
  • MM-Vet: 35.4%
  • MMBench: 64.3%

Limitations

  1. Hallucinations - May describe things not in image
  2. Spatial reasoning - Struggles with precise locations
  3. Small text - Difficulty reading fine print
  4. Object counting - Imprecise for many objects
  5. VRAM requirements - Need powerful GPU
  6. Inference speed - Slower than CLIP

Integration with frameworks

LangChain

Gradio App

Resources