Hugging Face

Sefism.Hugging Face

Tauseef Fayyaz

A to Z

Glossary

Every concept in this sheet, plus the smaller terms it uses. Select a concept to open its card.

A

Auto classes: Auto classes read a repo's config and build the right architecture.

C

Chat templates: Each chat model expects messages formatted with its own special tokens.

D

dtype and device_map: dtype="auto" loads weights in the precision they were saved in, often bfloat16, instead of float32.

G

generate: model.generate produces tokens one at a time.

H

Hub repositories: Every model, dataset and Space on the Hub is a Git-based repository with an id of the form owner/name, such as Qwen/Qwen3-8B.
huggingface_hub in Python: The huggingface_hub library downloads single files or whole repos, creates repos, uploads folders and searches the Hub from Python.

L

Licences and gated models: Each repo declares a licence, such as Apache 2.0, MIT or a custom model licence with usage conditions.

M

Model cards: The README of a model repo: what the model is for, how it was trained, its evaluation results, limitations and intended use, plus YAML metadata such as licence, tags and base model.
Model outputs and heads: Calling a model returns an output object: logits for models with a task head, last_hidden_state for a bare AutoModel, and loss when you pass labels.

P

pipeline: pipeline(task, model=...) bundles preprocessing, the model and postprocessing for a task such as text generation, classification, summarisation or speech recognition.

S

safetensors: The default weight format on the Hub: a simple file of tensors with a JSON header, which loads fast and cannot run code.
Spaces: Spaces host small apps, usually built with Gradio or as a Docker container, directly from a Hub repo, on free CPU or paid GPU hardware.

T

The hf CLI and login: The hf command line tool (the successor to huggingface-cli) logs in, downloads and uploads files.
The local cache: Downloads are stored once in a shared cache (by default under ~/.cache/huggingface) and reused by every library.