Weβre thrilled to announce that the Qwen3-VL family of vision-language models is now available on Azure AI Foundry, thanks to our collaboration with Microsoft.
We bring open-source innovation to enterprise-grade AI infrastructure, making it easier than ever for enterprise to deploy and scale the latest and greatest from models from hugging Face securely within Azure.
π Highlights:
- Deploy Qwen3-VL instantly via managed endpoints - Built-in governance, telemetry, and lifecycle management - True multimodal reasoning β vision, language, and code understanding - State-of-the-art performance, outperforming closed-source models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 - Available in both *Instruct* and *Thinking* modes, across 24 model sizes
π Get started today: search for Qwen3-VL in the Hugging Face Collection on Azure AI Foundry.
π Optimum libraries keep growing, and Optimum v2 is just around the corner!
I recently added ONNX export support for a bunch of new models in the optimum-onnx library, including: DeepSeek-V3, Cohere, Nemotron, Arcee, StableLM β¦ and more!
β‘ With ONNX export, you can run your favorite models faster and more efficiently across different hardware backends, making deployment and experimentation much smoother.
π‘ Have a model youβd love to see supported? Contributions are super welcome β letβs make Optimum even better together!
Is there a "one-size-fits-all" recipe for quantizing Large Language Models? π€
As part of my ongoing work in mixed-precision quantization, I've been exploring this question by measuring layer-by-layer sensitivity. The goal is to see if we can find universal rules for which layers can be quantized aggressively without impacting performance.The results are fascinating and reveal two key insights:
1οΈβ£ Sensitivity profiles are like architectural "fingerprints." Models from the same family share strikingly similar sensitivity patterns. As you can see in the charts below for the Gemma and SmolLM families, the ranking and relative sensitivity of the layers remain remarkably consistent. This suggests that the underlying architecture is a primary driver of a model's quantization behavior.
2οΈβ£ A "universal" mixed-precision quantization strategy is challenging. While models within a family are similar, these "fingerprints" change dramatically when comparing different architectures like LLaMA, Qwen, and StableLM. This highlights the difficulty in creating a generalized mixed-precision configuration that works optimally across all model families.
However, there is one near-universal truth we uncovered: the mlp.down_proj layer consistently emerges as one of the most sensitive components across all models studied. This finding strongly resonates with the work in "The Super Weight in Large Language Models" (by Mengxia Yu et al.). The paper identifies that functionally critical parameters, or "super weights," are concentrated in these down_proj layers. Our empirical results provide clear validation for this theory, showing these layers are highly intolerant to precision loss.
In short, while every architecture has a unique sensitivity profile, a fingerprint shaped not only by its core design but also by its specific training dataset and optimization approach, some components remain universally critical! What are your thoughts?
We now have the newest Open AI models available on the Dell Enterprise Hub!
We built the Dell Enterprise Hub to provide access to the latest and greatest model from the Hugging Face community to our on-prem customers. Weβre happy to give secure access to this amazing contribution from Open AI on the day of its launch!
π Optimum: The Last v1 Release π Optimum v1.27 marks the final major release in the v1 series. As we close this chapter, we're laying the groundwork for a more modular and community-driven future: - Optimum v2: A lightweight core package for porting Transformers, Diffusers, or Sentence-Transformers to specialized AI hardware/software/accelerators.. - OptimumβONNX: A dedicated package where the ONNX/ONNX Runtime ecosystem lives and evolves, faster-moving and decoupled from the Optimum core.
π― Why this matters: - A clearer governance path for ONNX, fostering stronger community collaboration and improved developer experience.. - Enable innovation at a faster pace in a more modular, open-source environment.
π‘ What this means: - More transparency, broader participation, and faster development driven by the community and key actors in the ONNX ecosystem (PyTorch, Microsoft, Joshua Lochner π, ...) - A cleaner, more maintainable core Optimum, focused on extending HF libraries to special AI hardware/software/accelerators tooling and used by our partners (Intel Corporation, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AMD, NVIDIA, FuriosaAI, ...)
π οΈ Major updates I worked on in this release: β Added support for Transformers v4.53 and SmolLM3 in ONNX/ONNXRuntime. β Solved batched inference/generation for all supported decoder model architectures (LLMs).
β¨ Big shoutout to @echarlaix for leading the refactoring work that cleanly separated ONNX exporter logic and enabled the creation of OptimumβONNX.
You can now find it in the Hugging Face Collection in Azure ML or Azure AI Foundry, along with 10k other Hugging Face models π€π€ Qwen/Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507-FP8
π New in Azure Model Catalog: NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B V2
We're excited to welcome Parakeet TDT 0.6B V2βa state-of-the-art English speech-to-text modelβto the Azure Foundry Model Catalog.
What is it?
A powerful ASR model built on the FastConformer-TDT architecture, offering: π Word-level timestamps βοΈ Automatic punctuation & capitalization π Strong performance across noisy and real-world audio
It runs with NeMo, NVIDIAβs optimized inference engine.
Want to give it a try? π§ You can test it with your own audio (up to 3 hours) on Hugging Face Spaces before deploying.If it fits your need, deploy easily from the Hugging Face Hub or Azure ML Studio with secure, scalable infrastructure!
π Learn more by following this guide written by @alvarobartt