Deploying Hugging Face Models with Roboflow: A Step-by-Step Guide to Integrating AI Models into Your Applications

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Introduction

Are you looking to deploy computer vision models to the edge or a private cloud? If yes, then this guide is for you! In this article, we will show you how to download models from Hugging Face and deploy them to Roboflow, a high-performance inference server for computer vision applications.

Supported Weights for Roboflow Deployment

As of writing this post, Roboflow supports a number of vision model architectures, which include:

• YOLOv5 (n, s, m, l, x) Object Detection and Instance Segmentation
• YOLOv7 Instance Segmentation (yolov7-seg)
• YOLOv8 (n, s, m, l, x) Object Detection, Instance Segmentation, Classification, and Keypoint Detection
• YOLOv9 (n, s, m, l, x) Object Detection
• YOLOv10 (n, s, m, l, x) Object Detection

In this guide, we will show how to deploy an Ultralytics YOLOv8 model as an example. For a complete list of models you can upload to Roboflow, check out the Weights Upload feature in the Roboflow documentation.

Step #1: Choose Your Model from Hugging Face

Go on Hugging Face and find your model weights. The model should have weights or a trained file attached to it. In this tutorial, we will use the default Ultralytics YOLOv8 weights on Hugging Face.

Step #2: Download Git and Git-LFS

To export a model from Hugging Face, we will need to install Git and Git-LFS. Git-LFS allows us to download larger git files, which is required for downloading weights.

To download git on Mac:

# run this command in terminal
brew install git (must have brew installed)
brew install git-lfs (must have brew installed)

Linux Ubuntu/Debian:

# run this command in terminal
sudo apt install git
sudo apt install git-lfs

Fedora:

# run this command in terminal
sudo dnf install git
sudo dnf install git-lfs

Step #3: Download Model Weights

With git, we can download the model weights. Using the link of our preferred model, the command should follow this format:

git clone https://huggingface.co//

Here is the command we need to run to download the model weights we are using as an example in this guide:

git clone https://huggingface.co/Ultralytics/YOLOv8/ 

We will then have the weights locally, ready for use.

Step #4: Upload Dataset and Model to Roboflow

To upload a model to Roboflow, you need to have the dataset associated with your model in your account.

You can upload annotated or raw computer vision data in over a dozen supported formats. See our list of supported upload formats.

Go to Workspaces and create a Project. Customize the project name and annotation group to your choice. Make sure to create an object detection project if you want to follow this guide.

Now that we have our annotations and images, we can generate a dataset version of your labeled images. Each version is unique and associated with a trained model so you can iterate on augmentation and data experiments. 

All models are associated with a dataset version. Once we have a dataset version, we can upload model weights associated with our dataset.

Step #5: Upload Model Weights

In the Hugging Face files you cloned over, you should see one with the last two letters as “pt”. This is your model.

Replace the following model information with your own model type as well as the path to your trained model.

To get the model, first go to the versions tab and click custom Train and Upload.

Next, select the type of data you want. Every model is trained on different data types. Therefore, we need to specify which type of data we need. In our case, we need YOLOv8. After selecting YOLOv8, click get snippet.

Conclusion

You can deploy computer vision models trained using supported architectures to Roboflow from Hugging Face. For example, you can upload a YOLOv8 object detection model to Robfolow. This model can then be deployed with Roboflow inference, a high-performance computer vision inference server.

By following the steps outlined in this tutorial, you can deploy Hugging Face models to the edge or in your own private cloud for real-time object detection systems.