As part of AMD’s newly released Instella family we are thrilled to introduce Instella-VL-1B, the first AMD vision language model for image understanding trained on AMD Instinct™ MI300X GPUs. Our journey with Instella-VL builds upon our previous 1-billion-parameter language models, AMD OLMo SFT. We further extend the language model’s visual understanding abilities by connecting it with a vision encoder (which is initialized from CLIP ViT-L/14-336). During training, we jointly finetune vision encoder and language model with vision-language data in three stages: Alignment, Pretraining and Supervised-Finetuning (SFT).