Deploy MiniCPM5-1B with vLLM

vLLM >=0.21 supports MiniCPM5-1B natively — no custom kernels. For production-grade throughput and OpenAI-compatible chat completions, this is the recommended path.

Install

pip install "vllm>=0.21"          # latest (CUDA 13.x driver hosts)
# pip install "vllm==0.10.1.1"    # fallback for CUDA 12.x driver hosts

OpenAI-compatible server

vllm serve openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B \
    --served-model-name MiniCPM5-1B \
    --dtype bfloat16 \
    --max-model-len 131072 \
    --gpu-memory-utilization 0.85 \
    --port 8000

Tuning knobs

Flag	Default	When to change
--max-model-len	131072 (native 128K)	drop to 8192 / 32768 to free KV-cache on small GPUs
--gpu-memory-utilization	0.85	drop on shared GPUs — vLLM hard-fails if (free / total) < value
--dtype	bfloat16	float16 for older GPUs (newer NVIDIA GPUs prefer bf16)
--enforce-eager	unset	set if CUDA graphs OOM on tiny VRAM budgets

Chat completions

curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{
        "model": "MiniCPM5-1B",
        "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "用一句话解释什么是 GQA。"}],
        "temperature": 0.9,
        "top_p": 0.95,
        "max_tokens": 1024,
        "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": true}
    }'

Mode	enable_thinking	temperature	top_p
Think	true	0.9	0.95
No-think	false	0.7	0.95

Sample run

$ curl -sS http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{"model":"MiniCPM5-1B","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"1+1=?"}],"max_tokens":64}'
{
  "id": "chatcmpl-...",
  "model": "MiniCPM5-1B",
  "choices": [{"message": {"role": "assistant", "content": "2"}, "finish_reason": "stop"}],
  "usage": {"prompt_tokens": 14, "completion_tokens": 2, "total_tokens": 16}
}

Offline / batched inference

from vllm import LLM, SamplingParams

llm = LLM(model="openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B", dtype="bfloat16", max_model_len=131072)
out = llm.chat(
    [[{"role": "user", "content": "用一句话解释 GQA。"}]],
    SamplingParams(temperature=0.9, top_p=0.95, max_tokens=512),
    chat_template_kwargs={"enable_thinking": True},
)
print(out[0].outputs[0].text)

Tool calling (plugin)

MiniCPM5-1B emits XML-style tool calls. The vLLM-side parser (vllm-project/vllm#43175) was merged to main on 2026-05-27 but is not in any pip release yet — v0.22.0 (2026-05-29) was cut before that merge and the file is absent from the v0.22.0 tree.

As a bridge, this repo ships the parser at tool_parsers/minicpm5xml_tool_parser.py (the same file as the upstream PR). Load it via vLLM's --tool-parser-plugin:

vllm serve openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B \
    --served-model-name MiniCPM5-1B \
    --dtype bfloat16 --max-model-len 131072 --port 8000 \
    --enable-auto-tool-choice \
    --tool-parser-plugin /path/to/MiniCPM/tool_parsers/minicpm5xml_tool_parser.py \
    --tool-call-parser minicpm5

curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{
        "model": "MiniCPM5-1B",
        "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the weather in Beijing?"}],
        "tools": [{
            "type": "function",
            "function": {
                "name": "get_weather",
                "description": "Get current weather for a city",
                "parameters": {
                    "type": "object",
                    "properties": {"city": {"type": "string"}},
                    "required": ["city"]
                }
            }
        }],
        "tool_choice": "auto",
        "temperature": 0.7, "max_tokens": 256
    }'

Once vLLM v0.23 (or later) is released with the parser baked in, drop --tool-parser-plugin and use only --tool-call-parser minicpm5.