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RekaAI/
reka-edge-2603

Name: reka-edge-2603
Rating: 2.5 (398 reviews)

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Reka Edge

Reka Edge is an extremely efficient 7B multimodal vision-language model that accepts image/video+text inputs and generates text outputs. This model is optimized specifically to deliver industry-leading performance in image understanding, video analysis, object detection, and agentic tool-use.

Learn more about the Reka Edge in our announcement blog post.

Demo | API Docs | Discord

Key features

Faster and more token-efficient than similarly sized VLMs
Strong benchmark performance across VQA-v2, RefCOCO, MLVU, MMVU and Mobile Actions (see below)
Support for vLLM (see plugin)
Open weights license: the model can be used commercially if you make less than $1 million USD of revenue a year

Benchmarks and metrics

Benchmark	Reka Edge	Cosmos-Reason2 8B	Qwen 3.5 9B	Gemini 3 Pro
VQA-V2 Visual Question Answering	88.40	79.82	83.22	89.78
MLVU Video Understanding	74.30	37.85	52.39	80.68
MMVU Multimodal Video Understanding	71.68	51.52	68.64	78.88
RefCOCO-A Object Detection	93.13	90.98	93.62	81.46
RefCOCO-B Object Detection	86.70	85.74	88.83	82.85
VideoHallucer Hallucination	59.57	51.65	56.00	66.78
Mobile Actions Tool Use	88.40	77.94	91.78	89.39

Metric	Reka Edge	Cosmos-Reason2 8B	Qwen 3.5 9B	Gemini 3 Pro*
Input tokens For a 1024 x 1024 image	331	1063	1041	1094
End-to-end latency (in seconds)	4.69 ± 2.48	10.56 ± 3.47	10.31 ± 1.81	16.67 ± 4.47
TTFT (s) Time to first token	0.522 ± 0.452	0.844 ± 0.923	0.60 ± 0.65	13.929 ± 3.872

*Gemini 3 Pro measured via API call; other models measured with local inference.

Quick Start

llama.cpp

To get started:

Use the weights from repo
Build the necessary artifacts from llama.cpp repo

cmake -B build
cmake --build build --target llama-server -j
cmake --build build --target llama-quantize -j

Run the GGUF conversion script (convert_reka_vlm_to_gguf.py) from the llama.cpp repo root

python3 convert_reka_vlm_to_gguf.py /path/to/reka/weights \
  --outfile /path/to/reka-text-f16.gguf \
  --outtype f16

# Export the vision encoder
python3 convert_reka_vlm_to_gguf.py /path/to/reka/weights \
  --mmproj \
  --outfile /path/to/reka-mmproj-f16.gguf \
  --outtype f16

(optional) Use the quantization scripts (quantize_reka_...) for simple quantizations of the model

# Example usage for text decoder quantization
bash inference/hf_release/quantize_reka_q4_last8_q8.sh /path/to/reka-text-f16.gguf /path/to/reka-text-q4_last8_q8.gguf

Run llama-server

./build/bin/llama-server -m /path/to/reka-text-f16.gguf \
  --mmproj /path/to/reka-mmproj-f16.gguf \
  -t 8 -c 2048 --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080 --reasoning off \

One note: the model does not currently support reasoning, so we run llama-server with --reasoning off.

🤗 Transformers (macOS)

The easiest way to run the model is with the included example.py script. It uses PEP 723 inline metadata so uv resolves dependencies automatically — no manual install step:

uv run example.py --image media/hamburger.jpg --prompt "What is in this image?"

Requirements

Edge Deployment Devices

Mac devices with Apple Silicon
- OS: macOS 13+
- Minimum: 24 GB memory
- Recommended: 32 GB+ memory
Linux and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) PCs
- Minimum: 24 GB GPU and 24 GB+ system memory
- Recommended: 32 GB+ GPU and 32 GB+ system memory
Nvidia Robotics & Edge AI systems
- Jetson Thor
- Jetson AGX Orin (both 32 GB and 64 GB variants)

Custom Deployment Options

With quantization, Reka Edge can also be run on:

Jetson Orin Nano
Samsung S25
Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 3 devices
Apple iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro

Reach out for support deploying Reka Edge to a custom edge compute platform.

Software Requirements

Python: 3.12+
uv (recommended) — handles dependencies automatically

Inline snippet

If you prefer not to use the script, install dependencies manually and paste the code below:

uv pip install "transformers==4.57.3" torch torchvision pillow tiktoken imageio einops av

python

import torch
from PIL import Image
from transformers import AutoModelForImageTextToText, AutoProcessor

model_id = "RekaAI/reka-edge-2603"

# Load processor and model
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(
    model_id,
    trust_remote_code=True,
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
).eval()

# Move to MPS (Apple Silicon GPU)
device = torch.device("mps")
model = model.to(device)

# Prepare an image + text query
image_path = "media/hamburger.jpg"  # included in the model repo
messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image", "image": image_path},
            {"type": "text", "text": "What is in this image?"},
        ],
    }
]

# Tokenize using the chat template
inputs = processor.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=True,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
    return_tensors="pt",
    return_dict=True,
)

# Move tensors to device
for key, val in inputs.items():
    if isinstance(val, torch.Tensor):
        if val.is_floating_point():
            inputs[key] = val.to(device=device, dtype=torch.float16)
        else:
            inputs[key] = val.to(device=device)

# Generate
with torch.inference_mode():
    # Stop on <sep> token (end-of-turn) in addition to default EOS
    sep_token_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("<sep>")
    output_ids = model.generate(
        **inputs,
        max_new_tokens=256,
        do_sample=False,
        eos_token_id=[processor.tokenizer.eos_token_id, sep_token_id],
    )

# Decode only the generated tokens
input_len = inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]
new_tokens = output_ids[0, input_len:]
output_text = processor.tokenizer.decode(new_tokens, skip_special_tokens=True)

# Strip any trailing <sep> turn-boundary marker
output_text = output_text.replace("<sep>", "").strip()
print(output_text)

Video queries

The model also accepts video inputs. Use --video instead of --image:

uv run example.py --video media/dashcam.mp4 --prompt "Is this person falling asleep?"

python

messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "video", "video": "media/dashcam.mp4"},
            {"type": "text", "text": "Is this person falling asleep?"},
        ],
    }
]

Object detection queries

Given an input image, we use Detect: {expression} to instruct the model to perform object detection, where {expression} can describe a single object or multiple objects.

python

messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image", "image": image_path},
            {"type": "text", "text": "Detect: red car, man in the white"},
        ],
    }
]

Text-only queries

Omit the image entry from the content list:

python

messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "text", "text": "What is the capital of France?"},
        ],
    }
]

Then run the same tokenization and generation steps as above.

Notes for MacOS

MPS and dtype: Apple's MPS backend does not support bfloat16. Always use torch.float16. Do not use device_map="auto" — it is not compatible with MPS. Load the model to CPU first, then call .to("mps").
Pinned transformers: This checkpoint was exported with transformers==4.57.3. Using a different version may cause loading errors or incorrect behavior.
Memory: The model requires ~14 GB in float16. A Mac with 32 GB unified memory is recommended to leave headroom for the OS and generation buffers.

vLLM

For high-throughput serving, you can use the vllm-reka plugin. This plugin extends standard vLLM to support Reka's custom architectures and optimized tokenizer.

Installation

Please follow our vllm-reka installation instructions to install the plugin along with vLLM.

Serving the Model

You can start the OpenAI-compatible API server by running the script serve.sh in vllm-reka with $MODEL_PATH set to RekaAI/reka-edge-2603.

bash serve.sh

We enable BitsAndBytes quantization by default here to reduce memory usage. To disable quantization, remove the --quantization flag from server.sh.

Querying the Server

Once the server is running, you can send requests using the OpenAI API format:

python

import openai

client = openai.OpenAI(
    base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1",
    api_key="EMPTY",
    timeout=3600
)

# Video query
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="RekaAI/reka-edge-2603",
    messages=[
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": [
                {"type": "video_url", "video_url": {"url": "https://example.com/video.mp4"}},
                {"type": "text", "text": "Describe the video"},
            ],
        }
    ],
    stop=["\n\n<sep>"],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

# Image query
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="RekaAI/reka-edge-2603",
    messages=[
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": [
                {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "https://example.com/image.png"}},
                {"type": "text", "text": "What is in this image?"}
            ]
        }
    ],
    stop=["\n\n<sep>"],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

# Object detection query
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="RekaAI/reka-edge-2603",
    messages=[
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": [
                {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "https://example.com/image.png"}},
                {"type": "text", "text": "Detect: green banana"}
            ]
        }
    ],
    stop=["\n\n<sep>"],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

# Text-only query
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="RekaAI/reka-edge-2603",
    messages=[
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": "What is the capital of France?",
        }
    ],
    stop=["\n\n<sep>"],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Notes

**trust_remote_code=True** is required because the model uses custom architecture code (Yasa2ForConditionalGeneration) that is bundled in this repository and loaded via the auto_map config.