smoldocling via docling-serve

[pbrady]

How do I duplicate the functionality of the docling cli using the server? Specifically, I have found that the following works well for my documents:

docling --pipeline vlm --vlm-model smoldocling ...

I've tried the following parameters following the python usage examples https://github.com/docling-project/docling-serve/blob/main/docs/usage.md:

parameters = {
"to_formats": ["md"],
"image_export_mode": "placeholder",
"do_ocr": False,
"abort_on_error": False,
"return_as_file": False,
"pipeline": "vlm"
}

...

response = await async_client.post(url, files=files, data={"parameters": json.dumps(parameters)})

However, the server is producing very poor text for the same input file as the cli. The poor text is similar to what I was getting before using vlm. Here's the output of running the server with dev:

INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:29,967 - docling_serve.docling_conversion - artifacts_path is unset. The system will download the model weights at runtime.
INFO:     Application startup complete.
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:45,458 - docling_serve.app - Received 1 files for processing.
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:45,458 - docling_serve.docling_conversion - artifacts_path is unset. The system will download the model weights at runtime.
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:45,492 - docling.document_converter - Going to convert document batch...
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:45,493 - docling.document_converter - Initializing pipeline for StandardPdfPipeline with options hash cb917a501917ffd372a2e69dae6fd392
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:45,536 - docling.utils.accelerator_utils - Accelerator device: 'mps'
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:46,948 - docling.utils.accelerator_utils - Accelerator device: 'mps'
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:47,957 - docling.utils.accelerator_utils - Accelerator device: 'mps'
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:48,121 - docling.models.factories.base_factory - Loading plugin 'docling_defaults'
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:48,121 - docling.models.factories - Registered picture descriptions: ['vlm', 'api']
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:49:48,121 - docling.pipeline.base_pipeline - Processing document inis_iaea_org-25003257.pdf
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:50:12,747 - docling.document_converter - Finished converting document inis_iaea_org-25003257.pdf in 27.29 sec.
INFO:	2025-04-23 10:50:12,747 - docling_serve.response_preparation - Processed 1 docs in 27.29 seconds.
INFO:     127.0.0.1:64635 - "POST /v1alpha/convert/file HTTP/1.1" 200 OK

What am I doing wrong?