Meet Qwen3-VL-4B and 8B-Thinking, models built to truly reason across text, visuals, and video. These aren’t just another pair of multimodal releases; they bring a level of understanding that feels deliberate, perceptive, and grounded. From analyzing dense research papers and parsing diagrams to navigating on-screen elements and generating full web layouts from a sketch or screenshot, Qwen3-Thinking models handle it all with calm precision. With a native 256K context window (scalable to 1M), deeper spatial and temporal grounding, and a re-engineered visual encoder stack that fuses detail and logic, these models think through problems rather than just reacting to prompts. Their expanded OCR engine supports 32 languages and even rare symbols, while the Interleaved-MRoPE and DeepStack architectures ensure text, image, and video flow together seamlessly, no context loss, no boundary between modalities.
This guide walks you through installing and running Qwen3-VL 4B and 8B-Thinking locally or within a GPU accelerated environment.
Multimodal Performance
Prerequisites
The minimum system requirements for running this model are:
- GPU: 1x RTX4090 or 1x RTX A6000 (depending on the use case scale)
- Storage: 10 GB (preferable)
- VRAM: at least 8 GB
- Anaconda installed
Step-by-step process to install and run Qwen3-VL 4B & 8B Thinking Locally
For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll use a GPU-powered Virtual Machine by NodeShift since it provides high compute Virtual Machines at a very affordable cost on a scale that meets GDPR, SOC2, and ISO27001 requirements. Also, it offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easier for beginners to get started with Cloud deployments. However, feel free to use any cloud provider of your choice and follow the same steps for the rest of the tutorial.
Step 1: Setting up a NodeShift Account
Visit app.nodeshift.com and create an account by filling in basic details, or continue signing up with your Google/GitHub account.
If you already have an account, login straight to your dashboard.
Step 2: Create a GPU Node
After accessing your account, you should see a dashboard (see image), now:
- Navigate to the menu on the left side.
- Click on the GPU Nodes option.
- Click on Start to start creating your very first GPU node.
These GPU nodes are GPU-powered virtual machines by NodeShift. These nodes are highly customizable and let you control different environmental configurations for GPUs ranging from H100s to A100s, CPUs, RAM, and storage, according to your needs.
Step 3: Selecting configuration for GPU (model, region, storage)
- For this tutorial, we’ll be using 1x RTX A6000 GPU, however, you can choose any GPU as per the prerequisites.
- Similarly, we’ll opt for 200GB storage by sliding the bar. You can also select the region where you want your GPU to reside from the available ones.
Step 4: Choose GPU Configuration and Authentication method
- After selecting your required configuration options, you’ll see the available GPU nodes in your region and according to (or very close to) your configuration. In our case, we’ll choose a 1x RTX A6000 48GB GPU node with 64vCPUs/63GB RAM/200GB SSD.
2. Next, you’ll need to select an authentication method. Two methods are available: Password and SSH Key. We recommend using SSH keys, as they are a more secure option. To create one, head over to our official documentation.
Step 5: Choose an Image
The final step is to choose an image for the VM, which in our case is Nvidia Cuda.
We will switch to the Custom Image tab and select a specific Docker image that meets all runtime and compatibility requirements.
We choose the following image:
nvidia/cuda:12.1.1-devel-ubuntu22.04
This image is essential because it includes:
- Full CUDA toolkit (including
nvcc)
- Proper support for building and running GPU-based applications
- Compatibility with CUDA 12.1.1 required by certain model operations
Launch Mode
We selected:
Interactive shell server
This gives us SSH access and full control over terminal operations — perfect for installing dependencies, running benchmarks, and launching models.
Docker Repository Authentication
We left all fields empty here.
Since the Docker image is publicly available on Docker Hub, no login credentials are required.
Identification
nvidia/cuda:12.1.1-devel-ubuntu22.04
That’s it! You are now ready to deploy the node. Finalize the configuration summary, and if it looks good, click Create to deploy the node.
Step 6: Connect to active Compute Node using SSH
- As soon as you create the node, it will be deployed in a few seconds or a minute. Once deployed, you will see a status Running in green, meaning that our Compute node is ready to use!
- Once your GPU shows this status, navigate to the three dots on the right, click on Connect with SSH, and copy the SSH details that appear.
As you copy the details, follow the below steps to connect to the running GPU VM via SSH:
- Open your terminal, paste the SSH command, and run it.
2. In some cases, your terminal may take your consent before connecting. Enter ‘yes’.
3. A prompt will request a password. Type the SSH password, and you should be connected.
Output:
Next, If you want to check the GPU details, run the following command in the terminal:
!nvidia-smi
Step 7: Set up the project environment with dependencies
- Create a virtual environment using Anaconda.
conda create -n qwen python=3.11 -y && conda activate qwen
Output:
2. Install required dependencies.
pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu121
pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/transformers
pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/accelerate
pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/diffusers
pip install huggingface_hub
pip install einops timm pillow
pip install sentencepiece bitsandbytes protobuf decord numpy
Output:
3. Install and run jupyter notebook.
conda install -c conda-forge --override-channels notebook -y
conda install -c conda-forge --override-channels ipywidgets -y
jupyter notebook --allow-root
4. If you’re on a remote machine (e.g., NodeShift GPU), you’ll need to do SSH port forwarding in order to access the jupyter notebook session on your local browser.
Run the following command in your local terminal after replacing:
<YOUR_SERVER_PORT> with the PORT allotted to your remote server (For the NodeShift server – you can find it in the deployed GPU details on the dashboard).
<PATH_TO_SSH_KEY> with the path to the location where your SSH key is stored.
<YOUR_SERVER_IP> with the IP address of your remote server.
ssh -L 8888:localhost:8888 -p <YOUR_SERVER_PORT> -i <PATH_TO_SSH_KEY> root@<YOUR_SERVER_IP>
Output:
After this copy the URL you received in your remote server:
And paste this on your local browser to access the Jupyter Notebook session.
Step 8: Download and Run the model
- Create a file named
app.py and paste the following inference code in it.
replace 4B with 8B if you’re running 8B version.
from transformers import Qwen3VLForConditionalGeneration, AutoProcessor
# default: Load the model on the available device(s)
model = Qwen3VLForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
"Qwen/Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking", dtype="auto", device_map="auto"
)
# We recommend enabling flash_attention_2 for better acceleration and memory saving, especially in multi-image and video scenarios.
# model = Qwen3VLForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
# "Qwen/Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking",
# dtype=torch.bfloat16,
# attn_implementation="flash_attention_2",
# device_map="auto",
# )
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking")
messages = [
{
"role": "user",
"content": [
{
"type": "image",
"image": "https://qianwen-res.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/Qwen-VL/assets/demo.jpeg",
},
{"type": "text", "text": "Describe this image."},
],
}
]
# Preparation for inference
inputs = processor.apply_chat_template(
messages,
tokenize=True,
add_generation_prompt=True,
return_dict=True,
return_tensors="pt"
)
inputs = inputs.to(model.device)
# Inference: Generation of the output
generated_ids = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=128)
generated_ids_trimmed = [
out_ids[len(in_ids) :] for in_ids, out_ids in zip(inputs.input_ids, generated_ids)
]
output_text = processor.batch_decode(
generated_ids_trimmed, skip_special_tokens=True, clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False
)
print(output_text)
2. Run the script to download the model checkpoints and run the model for inference.
python app.py
Input Image: https://qianwen-res.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/Qwen-VL/assets/demo.jpeg
Output:
Conclusion
Qwen3-VL-4B and 8B-Thinking redefine what it means for an AI model to truly understand and reason across modalities. With advanced spatial perception, long-context comprehension, and architectures like Interleaved-MRoPE and DeepStack powering fluid interaction between text, vision, and video, these models bridge intuition and logic in a single workflow. Paired with NodeShift Cloud, experimenting with Qwen3-Thinking becomes seamless, no GPU setup, no dependency tangles, just ready-to-run environments fine-tuned for high-performance inference. You can launch, test, and iterate instantly, unlocking the full creative and analytical potential of multimodal reasoning without worrying about the infrastructure beneath it.
