Serialization & Deserialization for Requests

Hugging Face Inference Endpount comes with a default serving container which is used for all supported Transformers and Sentence-Transformers tasks and for custom inference handler. The serving container takes care of serialization and deserialization of the request and response payloads based on the content-type headers of the request. That means that when you send a request with a JSON body and a content-type: application/json header, the serving container will deserialize the JSON payload into a Python dictionary and pass it to the inference handler.

Below is a list of supported content-types and the deserialized payload that is passed to the inference handler.

Content-Type Payload
application/json dict
text/csv raw
text/plain raw
image/png {"inputs": Image.open(BytesIO(body)).convert("RGB")}
image/jpeg {"inputs": Image.open(BytesIO(body)).convert("RGB")}
image/jpg {"inputs": Image.open(BytesIO(body)).convert("RGB")}
image/tiff {"inputs": Image.open(BytesIO(body)).convert("RGB")}
image/bmp {"inputs": Image.open(BytesIO(body)).convert("RGB")}
image/gif {"inputs": Image.open(BytesIO(body)).convert("RGB")}
image/webp {"inputs": Image.open(BytesIO(body)).convert("RGB")}
image/x-image {"inputs": Image.open(BytesIO(body)).convert("RGB")}
audio/x-flac {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/flac {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/mpeg {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/x-mpeg-3 {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/wave {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/wav {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/x-wav {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/ogg {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/x-audio {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/webm {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/webm;codecs=opus {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/AMR {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/amr {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/AMR-WB {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/AMR-WB+ {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/m4a {"inputs": bytes(body)}
audio/x-m4a {"inputs": bytes(body)}

The serving container currently only supports serialization of the response payload into JSON format. The response payload is serialized into a JSON string and the content-type header is set to application/json.