Allow specifying data with the Inference API wrapper

setup.py

@@ -28,6 +28,7 @@ def get_version() -> str:
 
 extras["testing"] = [
     "pytest",
+    "datasets",
 ]
 
 extras["quality"] = [

src/huggingface_hub/inference_api.py

@@ -30,12 +30,13 @@
     "text-to-speech",
     "automatic-speech-recognition",
     "audio-to-audio",
-    "audio-source-separation",
+    "audio-classification",
     "voice-activity-detection",
     # Computer vision
     "image-classification",
     "object-detection",
     "image-segmentation",
+    "text-to-image",
     # Others
     "structured-data-classification",
 ]
@@ -122,20 +123,23 @@ def __repr__(self):
 
     def __call__(
         self,
-        inputs: Union[str, Dict, List[str], List[List[str]]],
+        inputs: Optional[Union[str, Dict, List[str], List[List[str]]]] = None,
         params: Optional[Dict] = None,
+        data: Optional[bytes] = None,
     ):
         payload = {
-            "inputs": inputs,
             "options": self.options,
         }
 
+        if inputs:
+            payload["inputs"] = inputs
+
         if params:
             payload["parameters"] = params
 
         # TODO: Decide if we should raise an error instead of
         # returning the json.
         response = requests.post(
-            self.api_url, headers=self.headers, json=payload
+            self.api_url, headers=self.headers, json=payload, data=data
         ).json()
         return response

tests/test_inference_api.py

@@ -12,15 +12,21 @@
 # See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 # limitations under the License.
 
-
 import unittest
 
+import datasets
+
 from huggingface_hub.inference_api import InferenceApi
 
 from .testing_utils import with_production_testing
 
 
 class InferenceApiTest(unittest.TestCase):
+    def read(self, filename: str) -> bytes:
+        with open(filename, "rb") as f:
+            bpayload = f.read()
+        return bpayload
+
     @with_production_testing
     def test_simple_inference(self):
         api = InferenceApi("bert-base-uncased")
@@ -55,6 +61,29 @@ def test_inference_with_dict_inputs(self):
         self.assertTrue("score" in result)
         self.assertTrue("answer" in result)
 
+    @with_production_testing
+    def test_inference_with_audio(self):
+        api = InferenceApi("facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h-lv60-self")
+        dataset = datasets.load_dataset(
+            "patrickvonplaten/librispeech_asr_dummy", "clean", split="validation"
+        )
+        data = self.read(dataset[0]["file"])
+        result = api(data=data)
+        self.assertIsInstance(result, dict)
+        self.assertTrue("text" in result)
+
+    @with_production_testing
+    def test_inference_with_image(self):
+        api = InferenceApi("google/vit-base-patch16-224")
+        dataset = datasets.load_dataset("Narsil/image_dummy", "image", split="test")
+        data = self.read(dataset[0]["file"])
+        result = api(data=data)
+        self.assertIsInstance(result, list)
+        for classification in result:
+            self.assertIsInstance(classification, dict)
+            self.assertTrue("score" in classification)
+            self.assertTrue("label" in classification)
+
     @with_production_testing
     def test_inference_overriding_task(self):
         api = InferenceApi(