Instructions to use NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

How to use NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview with Transformers:

# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("image-text-to-text", model="NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview")
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, AutoModelForMultimodalLM

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview")
model = AutoModelForMultimodalLM.from_pretrained("NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview", device_map="auto")
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 NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview"
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview",
		"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/NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview

SGLang

How to use NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview 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 "NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview" \
    --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": "NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview",
		"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 "NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview" \
        --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": "NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview",
		"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 NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview
```

versae commited on Dec 22, 2025

Commit

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@@ -13,4 +13,44 @@ library_name: transformers
 tags:
 - conversational
 - instruct
----

 tags:
 - conversational
 - instruct
+- experimental
+---
+# Borealis 4B Instruct (Preview)
+## Model summary
+**NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview** is a **4B-parameter** instruction-tuned **preview** model intended for early testing and feedback. It is an **experiment** and should be treated as pre-release quality.
+This model is based on [**google/gemma-3-4b-it**](https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-3-4b-it), and fine-tuned on textual instructions only.
+## Training data
+Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) uses **NbAiLab/aurora-sft-2512** (not released yet).
+## ⚠️ Safety / alignment disclaimer (important)
+This is a **preview experiment** and **has not been safety-aligned yet**. The model may produce **harmful, biased, or insensitive** outputs (including content that is offensive, unsafe, or inappropriate). Do not use it for safety-critical or high-stakes applications, and add your own safety mitigations if deploying.
+## Intended use
+- Norwegian-centric assistant-style tasks (e.g., drafting, summarization, Q&A, light reasoning).
+- Assesstment of Norwegian writing style and quality.
+- Early evaluation of behavior, language coverage (Norwegian / Bokmål / Nynorsk), and quality.
+## Limitations
+- Preview quality; outputs may be unstable and may hallucinate.
+- Not aligned for safety; may follow harmful instructions or generate problematic content (see disclaimer above).
+## Weights & formats
+### Transformers (original)
+- **NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview** (safetensors).
+### GGUF quantizations
+Available in [**NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-gguf**](https://huggingface.co/NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-gguf):
+- `model-q8_0.gguf`
+- `model-f16.gguf`
+- `model-bf16.gguf`
+### MLX (Apple Silicon)
+Available in [**NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-mlx**](https://huggingface.co/NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-mlx)
+## Acknowledgements
+Thanks to the **Gemma** team at Google for releasing Gemma 3 and to everyone contributing feedback on this preview.