diff --git a/tests/models/registry.py b/tests/models/registry.py
index 8d6b45d479..cecd2d965a 100644
--- a/tests/models/registry.py
+++ b/tests/models/registry.py
@@ -1366,7 +1366,15 @@ _MULTIMODAL_EXAMPLE_MODELS = {
         "HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-2.2B-Instruct"
     ),
     "Step3VLForConditionalGeneration": _HfExamplesInfo(
-        "stepfun-ai/step3", trust_remote_code=True
+        "stepfun-ai/step3",
+        trust_remote_code=True,
+        max_transformers_version="5.3",
+        transformers_version_reason={
+            "hf": (
+                "Transformers v5.4 removed the ignore_keys param from "
+                "validate_rope(); vLLM has vendored the config and is unaffected"
+            )
+        },
     ),
     "StepVLForConditionalGeneration": _HfExamplesInfo(
         "stepfun-ai/Step3-VL-10B", trust_remote_code=True