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In this example, we go through a Truss that serves the Qwen 7B Chat LLM, and streams the output to the client.

Why streaming?

LLMs generate tokens in sequence, so you can return useful output to users before the full response is ready. Truss supports streaming output to do this.

Set up the imports

In this example, we use the HuggingFace transformers library to build a text generation model.
model/model.py

Define the load function

In the load function of the Truss, we implement logic involved in downloading the chat version of the Qwen 7B model and loading it into memory.
model/model.py

Define the preprocess function

In the preprocess function of the Truss, we set up a generate_args dictionary with some generation arguments from the inference request to be used in the predict function.
model/model.py

Define the predict function

In the predict function of the Truss, we implement the actual inference logic. The two main steps are:
  • Tokenize the input
  • Call the model’s generate function if we’re not streaming the output, otherwise call the stream helper function
model/model.py

Define the stream helper function

In this helper function, we’ll instantiate the TextIteratorStreamer object, which we’ll later use for returning the LLM output to users.
model/model.py
When creating the generation parameters, ensure to pass the streamer object that we created previously.
model/model.py
Spawn a thread to run the generation, so that it does not block the main thread.
model/model.py
In Truss, the way to achieve streaming output is to return a generator that yields content. In this example, we yield the output of the streamer, which produces output and yields it until the generation is complete. We define this inner function to create our generator.
model/model.py

Set up the config.yaml

Running Qwen 7B requires torch, transformers, and a few other related libraries.
config.yaml

Configure resources for Qwen

We will use an L4 to run this model.
config.yaml

Deploy Qwen 7B Chat

Deploy the model like you would other Trusses, with: