An MLX (4-bit) conversion of microsoft/Mage-VL — a 5B image/video vision-language model (Qwen3-4B text backbone + a from-scratch Mage-ViT "Codec-ViT" vision encoder) — that runs on Apple Silicon.

Port code, converter, and validators: https://github.com/rsravanreddy/Mage-VL-MLX

Weights: 3.1 GB (4-bit, group size 64)
Runs image, video (frame-sampling), and the streaming event gate locally on a Mac.

Usage

bash

# 1. install the MLX stack + register the mage_vl plugin
pip install mlx mlx-lm mlx-vlm numpy pillow tokenizers jinja2 av
git clone https://github.com/rsravanreddy/Mage-VL-MLX && cd Mage-VL-MLX
ln -s "$PWD/mage_vl" "$(python -c 'import mlx_vlm,os;print(os.path.dirname(mlx_vlm.__file__))')/models/mage_vl"

# 2. download these weights
hf download sr29/Mage-VL-mlx-4bit --local-dir mage-vl-mlx

# 3. run (image or video)
python scripts/generate.py --mlx mage-vl-mlx --tokenizer-src mage-vl-mlx \
    --image path/to/image.jpg --prompt "Describe this image."
python scripts/generate.py --mlx mage-vl-mlx --tokenizer-src mage-vl-mlx \
    --video path/to/video.mp4 --num-frames 8 --prompt "What is happening?"

Performance (Apple M4, 16GB)

model	weights	image decode	image peak RAM
4-bit	3.1 GB	30.6 tok/s	4.65 GB
8-bit	5.0 GB	19.1 tok/s	6.55 GB

4-bit is recommended for 16GB; 8-bit gives richer output if you have RAM.

Validation

Image preprocessing: bit-exact vs the HF Qwen2VLImageProcessor (max_abs_diff 0.0).
Vision tower: numerically matches the reference weights end-to-end (max_abs_diff 3.0e-4, fp32, full 24 layers).
Streaming Mamba mixer: matches a canonical selective-scan reference (4.3e-7).
Generation: qualitatively correct on image + video.
Not yet done: full end-to-end logit parity vs the HF model (memory-gated); the codec (token-reduction) video backend needs the external codec engine.

Streaming

Mage-VL's proactive event gate (streammind_gate) is ported (mage_vl/streaming.py). See scripts/stream.py for a per-frame silent/speak timeline. Note: the gate weights (streammind_gate.safetensors) are separate and downloaded from the upstream Mage-VL repo.

License & attribution

Apache-2.0. Derivative of microsoft/Mage-VL (Apache-2.0); reuses the Qwen3 language model from mlx-vlm. Weights converted, not retrained.