lmdeploy is a high-performance inference engine and deployment framework for large language models and vision models. It functions as a multi-modal model server and compression toolkit designed to serve models with high throughput and low latency.
The system enables the distribution of model services across multiple machines using request-based load balancing and tensor parallelism. It includes specialized tools for model quantization and compression to reduce the memory footprint of weights and caches.
The framework covers broad capability areas including production deployment, distributed model orchestration, and multimodal model serving. It supports both online serving and offline batch inference processing.