Llava

App in the BluixApps catalog

What it is

LLaVA (Large Language-and-Vision Assistant) is the leading open-source GPT-4V alternative — a multimodal LLM that understands images and text together. Built by Haotian Liu et al. (Microsoft Research alumni). Variants include LLaVA-1.6/NeXT, LLaVA-OneVision (video understanding), and many community fine-tunes.

When you need self-hosted "ChatGPT with vision", LLaVA is the canonical open choice.

What it's for

  • Image captioning — describe what's in an image in natural language
  • Visual Q&A (VQA) — answer questions about uploaded images
  • OCR-like text extraction — read text from images
  • Chart / diagram understanding — interpret graphs, tables, schematics
  • UI / screenshot understanding — describe app screens, web pages
  • Multi-turn vision chat — ongoing conversation about an image
  • Image content moderation — flag inappropriate visual content

Who it's for

  • AI app developers integrating vision into their products
  • Content moderation teams automating visual content review
  • Accessibility engineers generating alt-text at scale
  • Document AI builders extracting from scanned forms / receipts
  • Hosting providers offering vision-language API tier

Why teams pick LLaVA over alternatives

  • Apache 2.0 — fully open
  • Top open multimodal performance — competitive with GPT-4V on many benchmarks
  • Active research — frequent updates, OneVision adds video understanding
  • Wide model variants — 7B, 13B, 34B options
  • Mistral / Vicuna / Llama bases — multiple backbone options
  • HF ecosystem integration — drop-in to common pipelines

Integrations

  • Gradio web UI included
  • HuggingFace Transformers pipeline
  • OpenAI-style chat API via wrapper
  • Pair with: BluixApps Whisper (image + spoken Q&A pipeline)
  • Pair with: OCR (Surya) for text-heavy images
  • ComfyUI nodes for vision-conditional generation
  • LangChain integration for vision-aware agents

Notable users & community

  • 23k+ GitHub stars
  • Microsoft Research backing (original authors)
  • Used in moderation, accessibility, doc AI products
  • Multiple commercial integrations
  • Active HF community with fine-tunes for specific domains

Tips & operations

  • Model size by VRAM:
    • LLaVA-1.6 Mistral 7B: 16 GB
    • LLaVA-1.6 Vicuna 7B: 16 GB
    • LLaVA-1.6 Vicuna 13B: 26 GB
    • LLaVA-OneVision 7B: 16 GB (video support)
  • First gen time: ~5-15 sec per image (model + size dependent)
  • Multi-turn: model handles conversation history natively
  • Quantization: 4-bit reduces VRAM by ~60% with mild quality loss
  • API access: Gradio API at /api/predict/0 for automation
  • Prompt structure: be specific ("describe the layout", not "tell me about this")
  • Best at: photos, illustrations, docs, screenshots, simple charts
  • Weaker at: complex multi-panel docs, dense scientific figures

What we ship in BluixApps

  • Cloned haotian-liu/LLaVA repo
  • pytorch CUDA 12.4 base
  • Multi-process launch (controller + worker + gradio server)
  • Default model: liuhaotian/llava-v1.6-mistral-7b
  • Persistent volumes: repo, models (HF cache)
  • Port 7870 mapped
  • Install report at /root/bluixapps/llava.txt
  • Model variant guidance by VRAM
  • Use case examples (moderation, alt-text, document AI)
  • Pairing suggestions (Whisper for audio Q&A, OCR for text)
  • GPU pre-flight check via bluixapps_ensure_nvidia_runtime
  • Backup hook covers model cache
Read this app's deep dive on bluix.app ↗

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Same catalog. Scaling tenant isolation, white-label and support tier.

TierTenantsCatalogSupportWhite-labelMonthly
Stacks119 curated stacksStandard$19/moDetailDeploy
Starter10Full catalogStandard+$15–25/mo$49/moDetailDeploy
Pro25Full catalogPriority bugfix+$15–25/mo$149/moDetailDeploy
Growth100Full catalogPriority bugfix+$15–25/mo$349/moDetailDeploy
Scale500Full catalog7-day window+$15–25/mo$799/moDetailDeploy
EnterpriseUnlimitedFull catalogPriority 7-dayBundled$1,499/moDetailDeploy

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