Instructions to use google/gemma-3-4b-it with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.
- Libraries
- Transformers
How to use google/gemma-3-4b-it with Transformers:
# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper from transformers import pipeline pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="google/gemma-3-4b-it") messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"}, {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"} ] }, ] pipe(text=messages)# Load model directly from transformers import AutoProcessor, AutoModelForImageTextToText processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("google/gemma-3-4b-it") model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained("google/gemma-3-4b-it") messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "image", "url": "https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/p-blog/candy.JPG"}, {"type": "text", "text": "What animal is on the candy?"} ] }, ] inputs = processor.apply_chat_template( messages, add_generation_prompt=True, tokenize=True, return_dict=True, return_tensors="pt", ).to(model.device) outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=40) print(processor.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:])) - Inference
- Notebooks
- Google Colab
- Kaggle
- Local Apps Settings
- vLLM
How to use google/gemma-3-4b-it with vLLM:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install vLLM from pip: pip install vllm # Start the vLLM server: vllm serve "google/gemma-3-4b-it" # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "google/gemma-3-4b-it", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }'Use Docker
docker model run hf.co/google/gemma-3-4b-it
- SGLang
How to use google/gemma-3-4b-it with SGLang:
Install from pip and serve model
# Install SGLang from pip: pip install sglang # Start the SGLang server: python3 -m sglang.launch_server \ --model-path "google/gemma-3-4b-it" \ --host 0.0.0.0 \ --port 30000 # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "google/gemma-3-4b-it", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }'Use Docker images
docker run --gpus all \ --shm-size 32g \ -p 30000:30000 \ -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \ --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \ --ipc=host \ lmsysorg/sglang:latest \ python3 -m sglang.launch_server \ --model-path "google/gemma-3-4b-it" \ --host 0.0.0.0 \ --port 30000 # Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API): curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data '{ "model": "google/gemma-3-4b-it", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in one sentence." }, { "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://cdn.britannica.com/61/93061-050-99147DCE/Statue-of-Liberty-Island-New-York-Bay.jpg" } } ] } ] }' - Docker Model Runner
How to use google/gemma-3-4b-it with Docker Model Runner:
docker model run hf.co/google/gemma-3-4b-it
Feedback: mildly disappointed there isn't 9B version
These models seem great, I'm not ungrateful at all or anything. But I really enjoyed Gemma 2 9B and it's still my main model while I wait for Ollama support. For me on my system it is the perfect mix of speed and intelligence, much better than similarly sized models like llama 8b. Next time I would appreciate if 9B model was released, it's really the perfect balance honestly rather it be because of the extra billion parameters or some black magic not sure. Hopefully 12B doesn't require much more memory or inference time, I'm not sure if 4B will be quite at the same level as 9B in every regard outside of benchmarks
P.s. thanks for upping the context that was a huge pain point with Gemma 2 for me and my usecases also vision is neat
Also, all the models hallucinate a bit too much. Especially with links, I would just not bother with trying to get it to link things without web use suboptimal behavior imo