diff --git a/llama_stack/providers/inline/inference/meta_reference/parallel_utils.py b/llama_stack/providers/inline/inference/meta_reference/parallel_utils.py
index 97e96b929..7ade75032 100644
--- a/llama_stack/providers/inline/inference/meta_reference/parallel_utils.py
+++ b/llama_stack/providers/inline/inference/meta_reference/parallel_utils.py
@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ class ProcessingMessageWrapper(BaseModel):
 
 
 def mp_rank_0() -> bool:
-    return get_model_parallel_rank() == 0
+    return bool(get_model_parallel_rank() == 0)
 
 
 def encode_msg(msg: ProcessingMessage) -> bytes:
@@ -125,7 +125,7 @@ def retrieve_requests(reply_socket_url: str):
         reply_socket.send_multipart([client_id, encode_msg(obj)])
 
     while True:
-        tasks = [None]
+        tasks: list[ProcessingMessage | None] = [None]
         if mp_rank_0():
             client_id, maybe_task_json = maybe_get_work(reply_socket)
             if maybe_task_json is not None:
@@ -152,7 +152,7 @@ def retrieve_requests(reply_socket_url: str):
                     break
 
                 for obj in out:
-                    updates = [None]
+                    updates: list[ProcessingMessage | None] = [None]
                     if mp_rank_0():
                         _, update_json = maybe_get_work(reply_socket)
                         update = maybe_parse_message(update_json)
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 22ad816d0..4d54bece0 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -254,7 +254,6 @@ exclude = [
     "^llama_stack/models/llama/llama3/generation\\.py$",
     "^llama_stack/models/llama/llama3/multimodal/model\\.py$",
     "^llama_stack/models/llama/llama4/",
-    "^llama_stack/providers/inline/inference/meta_reference/parallel_utils\\.py$",
     "^llama_stack/providers/inline/inference/meta_reference/quantization/fp8_impls\\.py$",
     "^llama_stack/providers/inline/inference/sentence_transformers/sentence_transformers\\.py$",
     "^llama_stack/providers/inline/inference/vllm/",