feat(SmolDocling): Support MLX acceleration in VLM pipeline (#1199)

* Initial implementation to support MLX for VLM pipeline and SmolDocling

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* mlx_model unit

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* Add CLI choices for VLM pipeline and model

Signed-off-by: Christoph Auer <cau@zurich.ibm.com>

* Initial implementation to support MLX for VLM pipeline and SmolDocling

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* mlx_model unit

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* Add CLI choices for VLM pipeline and model

Signed-off-by: Christoph Auer <cau@zurich.ibm.com>

* Updated minimal vlm pipeline example

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* make vlm_pipeline python3.9 compatible

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* Fixed extract_text_from_backend definition

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* Updated README

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* Updated example

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* Updated documentation

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* corrections in the documentation

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>

* Consmetic changes

Signed-off-by: Christoph Auer <cau@zurich.ibm.com>

---------

Signed-off-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Auer <cau@zurich.ibm.com>
Co-authored-by: Maksym Lysak <mly@zurich.ibm.com>
Co-authored-by: Christoph Auer <cau@zurich.ibm.com>

pyproject.toml

@@ -192,6 +192,7 @@ module = [
   "docling_ibm_models.*",
   "easyocr.*",
   "ocrmac.*",
+  "mlx_vlm.*",
   "lxml.*",
   "huggingface_hub.*",
   "transformers.*",