Show HN: Peekaboolean – image and jev-like typed questions in typed anwers out

Peek at an image, get booleans back (and choices, and scores).

A small vision-language model that answers typed questions about an image, fast enough for a laptop. You send one image, a state (context) and any number of named questions. Each question is one of three types:

• choice : pick one of the options you supply, each with its own description
• score : place the image on an ordinal rubric you supply (any number of levels)
• noul : yes/no, returned as a probability

The model never generates text. It scores the options the caller wrote, so it only returns answers you asked for, the probabilities are calibrated, and a rubric the model never saw in training works as well as a familiar one.

• Backbone: SmolVLM-500M-Instruct , LoRA on the language model, vision tower frozen
• Head: the backbone's own logit(Yes) − logit(No) for "is this proposed answer correct?"
• Training: distilled from Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B (a local teacher that wrote and labelled requests) plus public VQA data
• Latency: about 400 ms p95 for a six-question request (28 options) on an M1 Pro (MPS, 512 px); about 60 ms on a desktop GPU
• Weights: GitHub release v0.1.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0, seeLicence )

How it was built and what did and did not work: docs/REPORT.md.

git clone https://github.com/bykof/peekaboolean && cd peekaboolean
uv sync --python 3.13
curl -L https://github.com/bykof/peekaboolean/releases/download/v0.1.0/peekaboolean-500m.tar.gz | tar xz
uv run python -m peekaboolean.serve --adapter peekaboolean-500m \
  --image photo.jpg --request requests/general.json --max-edge 512

--adapter takes a local checkpoint directory or a Hugging Face repo id. The base model downloads on first use. --device picks cuda, mps or cpu (default: auto).

A request (requests/general.json):

{
  "state": "Answer using only what is visible in the image.",
  "questions": {
    "kind": {
      "type": "choice",
      "instructions": "What kind of image is this?",
      "criteria": {
        "photo": "A photograph of a real scene",
        "screenshot": "An application or website screenshot",
        "document": "A scanned or photographed document page",
        "chart": "A chart, graph, or diagram"
      }
    },
    "sharpness": {
      "type": "score",
      "instructions": "How sharp is the image?",
      "criteria": [
        "very blurry",
        "somewhat blurry",
        "acceptable",
        "sharp"
      ]
    },
    "person_visible": {
      "type": "noul",
      "instructions": "Is a person visible in the image?"
    }
  }
}

The answer for a chart image:

{
  "answers": {
    "kind": {"type": "choice", "choice": "chart", "confidence": 0.755,
             "probabilities": {"photo": 0.0002, "screenshot": 0.180, "document": 0.004, "chart": 0.817}},
    "sharpness": {"type": "score", "score": 1.96, "confidence": 0.151,
                  "probabilities": {"0": 0.114, "1": 0.176, "2": 0.346, "3": 0.363},
                  "legend": {"0": "very blurry", "1": "somewhat blurry", "2": "acceptable", "3": "sharp"}},
    "person_visible": {"type": "noul", "noul": 0.047}
  }
}

score is the expected level index (0 = first level). noul is P(yes).

From Python, load once and reuse:

from peekaboolean.serve import load, evaluate
model, processor, calibration = load("peekaboolean-500m", device="mps", merge=True)
result = evaluate(model, processor, state, questions, "photo.jpg", calibration, max_edge=512)

state, instructions and every option may be a string, an object or a list. Noul questions may carry their own wording: "criteria": {"true": "...", "false": "..."}. Each question is scored independently, so answers do not depend on option order or on the other questions in the request.

--mode (default auto); all return the same answers in fp32:

• shared : encode image and state once, then score every option as a suffix against the KV cache
• single : everything in one forward pass; faster for small requests on MPS
• auto :single up to 8 options,shared above
• naive : one forward pass per question; the reference path

serve --check asserts that the three agree. python -m peekaboolean.benchmark measures warm latency per image size and request shape (--breakdown for per-stage times).

Calibration temperatures were fitted separately for 256, 384 and 512 px. Serve at 512 px unless latency forces a smaller size.

Held-out test split, 512 px. Image splits are by content hash, so no test image was seen in training. "Teacher" groups are requests written by the teacher model and measure agreement with the teacher, not with ground truth.

The untrained column comes from a 4,000-row validation sample. v6 is measured on its own (v6) test split, v8b on the full v7/v8 test split (21k questions); both use the same image splits. Per-group JSON reports are attached to the GitHub release.

Mac latency (M1 Pro, MPS, fp32, --mode auto, 512 px): a six-question request with 28 options measured about 380–400 ms p95 for the 500M backbone. The 256M v6 model: 116 ms for one noul, 230 ms for the six-question request.

• Accuracy against the teacher is not accuracy against people. There is no public human-labelled acceptance set for request-shaped questions yet.
• Photo aesthetics were dropped from training in v7; the model's aesthetic scores are no better than a text-only prior.
• The model estimates age, gender and "child or adult" from faces (FairFace training). These estimates carry the biases of the data and are wrong for individual people often enough that they must not be used to decide anything about a person. It also answers such questions for drawings and cartoon characters.
• Options are scored independently, so the model cannot compare options that differ only by contrast ("the larger one").

Everything that produced this checkpoint is in src/peekaboolean. The pipeline, in order:

1. prepare_general.py : typed questions fromThe Cauldron (VQAv2, CLEVR, TextVQA, DocVQA, ChartQA, Screen2Words, AI2D), training partitions only
2. prepare_teacher.py : a local Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B (vLLM) writes one request per image and labels it (see the module docstring; runs in its own vLLM environment)
3. prepare_v6.py : mixes public and teacher rows, adds counting rubrics, tempers the teacher's probabilities against rows with known answers
4. prepare_age.py : FairFace age, gender and child/adult questions
5. pipeline.py :train_general.py → per-size calibration and test report (postprocess.py ) → latency benchmark, as detached background jobs
6. full_test.py : score a checkpoint on every row of a test split

The exact settings for each version are in docs/REPORT.md. All runs used one RTX PRO 6000 (96 GB). docs/legacy-qwen-v1-v2.md describes the earlier Qwen3-VL-4B aesthetics experiments (train.py, prepare_ava.py, prepare_aadb.py, ...).

• Code: Apache-2.0 (LICENSE )
• Weights: CC BY-NC 4.0. The base model and the teacher are Apache-2.0, but some training data only allows research use (DocVQA; AVA and AADB images, which the teacher wrote questions about) or carries GPL-3.0 (ChartQA). The weights are therefore released for research and non-commercial use. Details are in the model card.

See CITATION.cff.