Support inference URLs for models used by scanners

[adrien-lesur]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
My understanding of the documentation and the code is that llm-guard will lazy-load the models required by the chosen scanners from Huggingface. I apologize if this is incorrect

This is not ideal for consumers like Kubernetes workloads because :

• When llm-guard is used as a library
  • each pod will download the same models, wasting resources
  • k8s workloads are usually preferred with low resource allocations to do efficient horizontal scaling.
• With "usage as API" scenario to have an llm-guard-api dedicated deployment with more resources
  • you might still want your llm-guard-api deployment to scale too, and you face the same resource optimization issue.

A third option is that you already have the models deployed somewhere in a central place so that the only information required by the scanners would be the inference URL and the authentication.

Describe the solution you'd like
Users that use a platform to host and run models in a central place should be able to provide inference URLs and authentication to the scanners, instead of lazy-loading the models.

Describe alternatives you've considered
The existing possible usages described by the documentation (as a library or as API).

[asofter]

Hey @adrien-lesur , at some point, we considered having the support of HuggingFace Inference Endpoints but we learned that it's not used widely.

How would you usually deploy those models? I assume https://github.com/neuralmagic/deepsparse or something.

[adrien-lesur]

Hi @asofter,
The models would usually be deployed via vLLM like documented here for Mistral.