Marlin 2B — MLX 8-bit (Apple Silicon)

MLX 8-bit quantized version of NemoStation/Marlin-2B for fast inference on Apple Silicon Macs.

Key specs

What is Marlin?

Marlin is a 2B video VLM for dense captioning and temporal grounding:

• Caption mode: Scene: <paragraph> + Events: <start-end> <description>
• Find mode: Given a query, returns From X.X to Y.Y.

Recommended usage: Hybrid approach

The hybrid approach uses HF transformers for input preparation (correct M-RoPE temporal positions) and MLX for fast generation. This gives correct timestamps + MLX speed.

Install

pip install mlx-vlm "transformers>=5.7.0" torch torchcodec "qwen-vl-utils>=0.0.14"

Code

import os
os.environ["FORCE_QWENVL_VIDEO_READER"] = "torchcodec"
os.environ["VIDEO_MAX_PIXELS"] = "200704"
os.environ["FPS"] = "2.0"
os.environ["FPS_MAX_FRAMES"] = "240"
os.environ["FPS_MIN_FRAMES"] = "4"

import mlx.core as mx
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoProcessor
from mlx_vlm import load as mlx_load
from mlx_vlm.models.cache import make_prompt_cache

HF_MODEL = "NemoStation/Marlin-2B"
MLX_MODEL = "junwatu/Marlin-2B-MLX-8bit"

CAPTION_PROMPT = (
    "Provide a spatial description of this clip followed by time-ranged events.\n"
    "For each event, give the time range as <start - end> and a short description."
)

# 1. Prepare inputs with HF (correct position encoding)
hf_processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(HF_MODEL, trust_remote_code=True)
hf_model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    HF_MODEL, trust_remote_code=True, dtype=torch.float32, low_cpu_mem_usage=True
)

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": [
    {"type": "video", "video": "video.mp4"},
    {"type": "text", "text": CAPTION_PROMPT},
]}]
inputs = hf_processor.apply_chat_template(
    messages, tokenize=True, add_generation_prompt=True,
    return_tensors="pt", return_dict=True,
)
with torch.no_grad():
    position_ids, _ = hf_model.model.get_rope_index(
        input_ids=inputs["input_ids"],
        mm_token_type_ids=inputs["mm_token_type_ids"],
        video_grid_thw=inputs.get("video_grid_thw"),
        attention_mask=inputs.get("attention_mask"),
    )
del hf_model  # free memory

# 2. Generate with MLX (fast)
mlx_model, mlx_processor = mlx_load(MLX_MODEL)
input_ids = mx.array(inputs["input_ids"].numpy())
pixel_values = mx.array(inputs["pixel_values_videos"].numpy())
video_grid_thw = mx.array(inputs["video_grid_thw"].numpy())

embedding_output = mlx_model.get_input_embeddings(
    input_ids, pixel_values,
    mask=mx.array(inputs["attention_mask"].numpy()),
    video_grid_thw=video_grid_thw,
)
mlx_model.language_model._position_ids = mx.array(position_ids.numpy())

prompt_cache = make_prompt_cache(mlx_model.language_model)
outputs = mlx_model.language_model(
    input_ids, inputs_embeds=embedding_output.inputs_embeds, cache=prompt_cache
)
mx.eval([c.state for c in prompt_cache])

# Greedy decode
eos = mlx_model.config.eos_token_id
y = mx.argmax(outputs.logits[:, -1, :], axis=-1, keepdims=True)
tokens = []
for _ in range(384):
    t = y.item()
    if t == eos:
        break
    tokens.append(t)
    outputs = mlx_model.language_model(y, cache=prompt_cache)
    mx.eval([c.state for c in prompt_cache])
    y = mx.argmax(outputs.logits[:, -1, :], axis=-1, keepdims=True)

text = mlx_processor.tokenizer.decode(tokens, skip_special_tokens=True)
print(text)

Alternative: Pure MLX (faster, compressed timestamps)

If you only need scene descriptions and don't need precise timestamps:

from mlx_vlm import load, generate
from mlx_vlm.prompt_utils import apply_chat_template
from mlx_vlm.utils import load_config

model, processor = load("junwatu/Marlin-2B-MLX-8bit")
config = load_config("junwatu/Marlin-2B-MLX-8bit")

prompt = apply_chat_template(processor, config, CAPTION_PROMPT, video=["video.mp4"], fps=2.0)
output = generate(model, processor, prompt, video=["video.mp4"], max_tokens=384, fps=2.0)
print(output.text)  # ~22s, timestamps compressed but descriptions accurate

Serving as an API

# See scripts/serve_marlin_mlx.py in the repo for a FastAPI server
# Key: endpoint must be async to keep MLX on the main event loop thread
uvicorn.run(app, host="0.0.0.0", port=8080, workers=1, loop="asyncio")

Conversion details

# Patch vision_config.model_type from "qwen3_5_vision" to "qwen3_5" first
python -m mlx_vlm.convert --hf-path NemoStation/Marlin-2B --mlx-path Marlin-2B-MLX-8bit -q --q-bits 8

Performance (Apple Silicon)

Tested on 8-second video clips:

Known limitations

• Pure mlx-vlm mode produces compressed timestamps due to missing mm_token_type_ids support in their Qwen3.5 M-RoPE implementation. Use the hybrid approach for correct timestamps.
• The hybrid approach requires both transformers and mlx-vlm installed.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1/M2/M3/M4)
• Python 3.10+
• mlx-vlm >= 0.5.0
• transformers >= 5.7.0 (for hybrid mode)
• torch, torchcodec, qwen-vl-utils >= 0.0.14

License

Apache 2.0 (same as base model)