Model reference · open weights

DialoGPT-small

LLMs microsoft Text gen 1 build Open weights 54k dl/mo

DialoGPT-small is an open-weight language model from microsoft. DialoGPT-small (FP16) weighs 351 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • DialoGPT-small is a 176M parameter text-generation model developed by Microsoft for multiturn dialogue response generation.
  • It is trained on 147M multi-turn dialogues from Reddit and supports a context length of 1024 tokens.
  • The model is available under the MIT license.

Summary of the microsoft/DialoGPT-small model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bymicrosoft
Released2022-03-02
Parameters176M
VRAM351 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for DialoGPT-small (FP16)

351 MBweights, file size
37 MBcache per 1K tokens
519 MBruntime overhead, at least
1,024 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
1K each
RTX 3060 12 GB284all 1K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB385all 1K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB596all 1K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB595all 1K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB798all 1K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB1000+all 1K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB1000+all 1K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB1000+all 1K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB1000+all 1K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified1000+all 1K107 GB
H200 141 GB1000+all 1K138 GB
B200 180 GB1000+all 1K176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once1K tokens each
1908 MB
51.1 GB
81.2 GB
161.5 GB
322.1 GB
643.3 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

From the model card

What microsoft says about DialoGPT-small

Read the model card

A State-of-the-Art Large-scale Pretrained Response generation model (DialoGPT)

DialoGPT is a SOTA large-scale pretrained dialogue response generation model for multiturn conversations. The human evaluation results indicate that the response generated from DialoGPT is comparable to human response quality under a single-turn conversation Turing test. The model is trained on 147M multi-turn dialogue from Reddit discussion thread.

  • Multi-turn generation examples from an interactive environment:
RoleResponse
UserDoes money buy happiness?
BotDepends how much money you spend on it .
UserWhat is the best way to buy happiness ?
BotYou just have to be a millionaire by your early 20s, then you can be happy .
UserThis is so difficult !
BotYou have no idea how hard it is to be a millionaire and happy . There is a reason the rich have a lot of money

Please find the information about preprocessing, training and full details of the DialoGPT in the original DialoGPT repository

ArXiv paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00536

How to use

Now we are ready to try out how the model works as a chatting partner!

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("microsoft/DialoGPT-small")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("microsoft/DialoGPT-small")

# Let's chat for 5 lines
for step in range(5):
	# encode the new user input, add the eos_token and return a tensor in Pytorch
	new_user_input_ids = tokenizer.encode(input(">> User:") + tokenizer.eos_token, return_tensors='pt')

	# append the new user input tokens to the chat history
	bot_input_ids = torch.cat([chat_history_ids, new_user_input_ids], dim=-1) if step > 0 else new_user_input_ids

	# generated a response while limiting the total chat history to 1000 tokens,
	chat_history_ids = model.generate(bot_input_ids, max_length=1000, pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id)

	# pretty print last ouput tokens from bot
	print("DialoGPT: {}".format(tokenizer.decode(chat_history_ids[:, bot_input_ids.shape[-1]:][0], skip_special_tokens=True)))

Open LLM Leaderboard Evaluation Results

Detailed results can be found here

MetricValue
Avg.25.02
ARC (25-shot)25.77
HellaSwag (10-shot)25.79
MMLU (5-shot)25.81
TruthfulQA (0-shot)47.49
Winogrande (5-shot)50.28
GSM8K (5-shot)0.0
DROP (3-shot)0.0

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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