Thanks for assigning this issue to me. I'm starting to work on it and will keep this PR's description up to date as I form a plan and make progress.

Original issue description:

Describe the bug

The InferenceClient API still does not support many of the tasks that can be hosted at inference endpoints, but gives a deprecation warning when using.post to get around this.

Reproduction

fromhuggingface_hubimportInferenceClient,get_inference_endpointimportjson# Get endpoint and create clientMODEL_NAME="YOUR_MODEL_NAME_OR_ENDPOINT_NAME"NAMESPACE="YOUR_NAMESPACE"endpoint=get_inference_endpoint(MODEL_NAME,namespace=NAMESPACE)client=InferenceClient(endpoint.url,timeout=10)# Test dataquery="What is the capital of France?"document="Paris is the capital of France."sentence_ranking_style_inputs= [[query,document]]text_classification_style_inputs= [{"text":query,"text_pair":document}]# 1. Using post methodresponse_bytes=client.post(json={"inputs":sentence_ranking_style_inputs})print(json.loads(response_bytes))# Problem: post method has deprecation warning# 2. Using text_classification tasktry:result=client.text_classification(text_classification_style_inputs)# There's no way to inject the inputs format that would have worked on this task for rerankingprint(result)exceptExceptionase:print(f"text_classification error:{e}")# Problem: text_classification doesn't properly support text pairs format needed for reranking/cross-encoding# 3. Using sentence_similarity tasktry:result=client.sentence_similarity(sentence_ranking_style_inputs)# There's no direct way to inject the inputs format that would have worked on this task for rerankingprint(result)exceptExceptionase:print(f"sentence_similarity error:{e}")# Problem: No direct support for sentence ranking despite endpoint supporting this task

Ideally, the sentence_ranking task is supported.

Logs

System info

- huggingface_hub version: 0.30.2- Platform: macOS-15.4-arm64-arm-64bit- Python version: 3.12.10- Runningin iPython?: No- Runningin notebook?: No- Runningin Google Colab?: No- Runningin Google Colab Enterprise?: No- Token path?: redacted- Has saved token?: False- Configured git credential helpers: redacted- FastAI: N/A- Tensorflow: N/A- Torch: 2.7.0- Jinja2: 3.1.6- Graphviz: N/A- keras: N/A- Pydot: N/A- Pillow: 11.2.1- hf_transfer: N/A- gradio: N/A- tensorboard: N/A- numpy: 1.26.4- pydantic: 2.11.4- aiohttp: 3.11.18- hf_xet: N/A- ENDPOINT: https://huggingface.co- HF_HUB_CACHE: redacted- HF_ASSETS_CACHE: redacted- HF_TOKEN_PATH: redacted- HF_STORED_TOKENS_PATH: redacted- HF_HUB_OFFLINE: False- HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY: False- HF_HUB_DISABLE_PROGRESS_BARS: None- HF_HUB_DISABLE_SYMLINKS_WARNING: False- HF_HUB_DISABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_WARNING: False- HF_HUB_DISABLE_IMPLICIT_TOKEN: False- HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER: False- HF_HUB_ETAG_TIMEOUT: 10- HF_HUB_DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT: 10

Fixes#3055.

💡 You can make Copilot smarter by setting up custom instructions, customizing its development environment and configuring Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Learn moreCopilot coding agent tips in the docs.