I trained a 500M VLM that answers typed questions about an image (choice / score / yes-no) with calibrated probabilities. ~400 ms on an M1 Pro, no text generation [P]

My apps kept needing a handful of decisions about one image: what kind of image is it, is it sharp, is a person in it, which of these four descriptions fits. A generative VLM can answer that, but on a laptop it's slow, I