`InferencePackingConfig` fails when input contains empty strings

### **Description** When using `InferencePackingConfig`, the model crashes if the input list contains an empty string (`""`). Standard inference (without packing) handles empty strings gracefully by returning an empty list of entities, but the packing logic triggers a `ValueError`. ### Steps to Reproduce The following script demonstrates that the model works as expected during standard inference but fails as soon as packing is enabled. ```python from gliner import GLiNER, InferencePackingConfig model = GLiNER.from_pretrained("urchade/gliner_medium-v2.1") # or "knowledgator/gliner-decoder-base-v1.0," "knowledgator/gliner-bi-small-v1.0" texts = ["Email CEO to approve budget", ""] labels = ["person", "organization", "action"] # 1. Standard inference works fine print("Running standard inference...") predictions = model.inference(texts, labels, batch_size=16) print(f"Standard results: {predictions}") # Expected: [[{'start': 6, 'end': 9, 'text': 'CEO', 'label': 'person', ...}], []] # 2. Inference with packing fails print("\nRunning packed inference...") packing_cfg = InferencePackingConfig( max_length=512, sep_token_id=model.data_processor.transformer_tokenizer.sep_token_id, streams_per_batch=1, ) model.configure_inference_packing(packing_cfg) predictions_packed = model.inference(texts, labels, batch_size=16) ``` ### Expected Behavior The packed inference should return an empty list for the empty string entry, matching the behaviour of standard inference: `[[{...}], []]` ### Actual Behavior **Traceback Snippet:** ```text ... File "/home/user/.local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/flashdeberta/model.py", line 443, in forward raise ValueError("You have to specify either input_ids or inputs_embeds") ValueError: You have to specify either input_ids or inputs_embeds ``` ### Models I can confirm the problem affects various models, e.g. `urchade/gliner_medium-v2.1` `knowledgator/gliner-decoder-base-v1.0`, `knowledgator/gliner-bi-small-v1.0`. However, `knowledgator/gliner-x-base` is not affected. Instead, empty strings lead to a different error, which I'll make another issue for. ### Environment details * **GLiNER:** v0.2.24 * **Flash-DeBERTa Version:** v2.7.4.post1+25.11 * **Python Version:** 3.12 --- ### Potential Workaround Users can filter out empty strings before passing them to the model, but this requires manual management of indices to re-align results later. An internal fix to unify the behaviour between standard and packed inference would be ideal.