diff --git a/src/autogluon/cloud/scripts/sagemaker_scripts/multimodal_serve.py b/src/autogluon/cloud/scripts/sagemaker_scripts/multimodal_serve.py
index 4f8e180..647e239 100644
--- a/src/autogluon/cloud/scripts/sagemaker_scripts/multimodal_serve.py
+++ b/src/autogluon/cloud/scripts/sagemaker_scripts/multimodal_serve.py
@@ -63,6 +63,8 @@ def transform_fn(model, request_body, input_content_type, output_content_type="a
         payload = pickle.loads(buf)
         data = pd.read_parquet(BytesIO(payload["data"]))
         inference_kwargs = payload["inference_kwargs"]
+        if inference_kwargs is None:
+            inference_kwargs = {}
 
     elif input_content_type == "application/x-autogluon-npy":
         buf = bytes(request_body)