vllm/docs/source/features/prompt_embeds.md
Reid 8f55962a7f
[Misc] refactor prompt embedding examples (#18405)
Signed-off-by: reidliu41 <reid201711@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: reidliu41 <reid201711@gmail.com>
2025-05-20 15:26:12 +00:00

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# Prompt Embedding Inputs
This page teaches you how to pass prompt embedding inputs to vLLM.
## What are prompt embeddings?
The traditional flow of text data for a Large Language Model goes from text to token ids (via a tokenizer) then from token ids to prompt embeddings. For a traditional decoder-only model (such as meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct), this step of converting token ids to prompt embeddings happens via a look-up from a learned embedding matrix, but the model is not limited to processing only the embeddings corresponding to its token vocabulary.
:::{note}
Prompt embeddings are currently only supported in the v0 engine.
:::
## Offline Inference
To input multi-modal data, follow this schema in {class}`vllm.inputs.EmbedsPrompt`:
- `prompt_embeds`: A torch tensor representing a sequence of prompt/token embeddings. This has the shape (sequence_length, hidden_size), where sequence length is the number of tokens embeddings and hidden_size is the hidden size (embedding size) of the model.
### Hugging Face Transformers Inputs
You can pass prompt embeddings from Hugging Face Transformers models to the `'prompt_embeds'` field of the prompt embedding dictionary, as shown in the following examples:
<gh-file:examples/offline_inference/prompt_embed_inference.py>
## Online Serving
Our OpenAI-compatible server accepts prompt embeddings inputs via the [Completions API](https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions). Prompt embeddings inputs are added via a new `'prompt_embeds'` key in the JSON package.
When a mixture of `'prompt_embeds'` and `'prompt'` inputs are provided in a single request, the prompt embeds are always returned first.
Prompt embeddings are passed in as base64 encoded torch tensors.
### Transformers Inputs via OpenAI Client
First, launch the OpenAI-compatible server:
```bash
vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct --task generate \
--max-model-len 4096 --enable-prompt-embeds
```
Then, you can use the OpenAI client as follows:
<gh-file:examples/online_serving/prompt_embed_inference_with_openai_client.py>