Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Cola2 vs LFM3-VL-2B
LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Cola2 F
Best for Researchers working on latent or diffusion language models who want a checkpoint to study
No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.
Watch for
No licence stated for the weights
Best for Agents on a laptop, phone or robot that need to read screens, documents, images and video from a model under 2 GB at 4 bits
Ahead on
- Reach, 85 against 25
- Agent interface, 90 against 20
- Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 58
Watch for
vLLM and SGLang support is unreleased, which the card says itself
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Agent interface LFM3-VL-2B +70
Cola2 20
Chat template 20, A chat template in tokenizer_config.json (4,116 characters), which came with the Qwen3 tokenizer. Tool-calling format 0, none. Trained tool calling 0, not trained for tool calling. Structured output 0, Nothing about JSON or schema-constrained output. Reasoning control 0, no reasoning mode. Context 0, no context length is stated. 20 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 20.
LFM3-VL-2B 90
Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, images and video, tools, deferred tools, tool results and the thinking switch. Tool-calling format 25, the card and Liquid's tool-use page document tools passed through tools= in apply_chat_template, calls returned as XML and results sent back as tool messages. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so several calls fit in one turn, and the card says its fine-tuning mix included tool calling and agentic traces. Structured output 5, the card's vLLM and SGLang commands set a structured-output backend and its fine-tuning table has a JSON extraction notebook, but nothing says how to ask this model for JSON. Liquid's API guide documents response_format with lfm3-1.7b as its example. Reasoning control 10, Liquid's chat-template page documents enable_thinking=False in apply_chat_template for LFM3, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and the card documents preserve_thinking and reports a no-thinking configuration in its benchmarks. Context 10, 128K tokens of input and output per the card, and max_position_embeddings 128000 for the language model in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 5 + 10 + 10 = 90.
Reach LFM3-VL-2B +60
Cola2 25
Memory 15, the only build is the F32 safetensors set, 35.07 GB, and 35.07 GB × 1.2 = 42.1 GB, within 64 GB. Loaded as BF16, as the card's example does, it needs about half, but the line reads the file size. Runtimes 0, none of the six runs it in a released version. Builds 0, one set of weights and no quantised build. Terms 0, no licence for the weights. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it, and nothing names an API that serves it. 15 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 25.
LFM3-VL-2B 85
Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB with its 0.20 GB projector file, and 1.30 GB × 1.2 = 1.6 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 15, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture and the LFM3-VL projector (src/models/lfm3.cpp and tools/mtmd at b12242), Ollama's library has an lfm3-vl entry, and LM Studio's catalogue lists liquid/lfm3-vl-2b. Builds 15, Liquid's GGUF repository holds Q4_0, Q4_K_M, Q8_0, F16 and BF16 files, and Liquid publishes 4-bit and 8-bit MLX builds and an ONNX repository, all in the LiquidAI organisation. Terms 10, the LFM Open License v1.0, a custom licence that lets anyone use it commercially for free below a threshold of $10M annual revenue. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the model and its GGUF, MLX and ONNX repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Liquid's own API lists lfm3-vl-2b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 85.
Documentation and upkeep LFM3-VL-2B +19
Cola2 58
Model card 8, Intended use and limitations (the out-of-scope list, and the unconverged latent model) and the architecture are on the card and the GitHub model card it links. Training data 15, the GitHub model card names the source (OLMo 2 pretraining text, retokenised) and the mix by stage with token counts, 346.03B in all. Last change 20, All six commits are from 6 November 2026, four days before this check, the last one updating a checksum in the README. Responsiveness 0, no discussions on the repository, so nobody has asked anything yet and the line reads as none answered, as settled in calibration. Version policy 5, A first release. File health 10, Config, files and card agree: F32 weights, a float32 config and a card that says to load them as bfloat16, with SHA256SUMS to check the download. 8 + 15 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 58.
LFM3-VL-2B 77
Model card 17, Intended use (questions about video, documents, charts and app screens, finding objects, spatial reasoning), a limitation (not recommended for coding, multi-turn conversations or complex reasoning), architecture (language model, 14-layer vision encoder and projector), parameters (1.92B), context (128K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: the base's 22T tokens of pre-training with the kinds of data added since LFM2, then vision mid-training on image and video data, supervised fine-tuning, vision reinforcement learning and distillation. Last change 20, the last commit, on 9 November 2026, added the OpenVINO checkpoint to the card's inference table, a day before this check. Responsiveness 20, Of the 5 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 to 31 October 2026), 3 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is most. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the lfm3_vl architecture, the 128,000-token context and the vision settings in processor_config.json. 17 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 5 + 10 = 77.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cola2 | LFM3-VL-2B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 25 | 85 | LFM3-VL-2B +60 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 40 | 40 | even |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 20 | 90 | LFM3-VL-2B +70 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 58 | 77 | LFM3-VL-2B +19 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | F 33.9/100 | C 61/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cola2 | LFM3-VL-2B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | ByteDance (Seed) | Liquid AI |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | None stated for the weights (the code is Apache 2.0) | LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue) |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-11-06 | 2026-11-09 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
Verdicts
Cola2
A research release, and an honest one: ByteDance Seed says it's a base model with an unconverged latent stage, scoring below Llama-3-8B on its own table. It's here for people studying continuous-latent generation. Agents can't use it as a model: 32-token completions, no chat or tools, the repository's own code to load it, and no licence on the weights.
LFM3-VL-2B
A 1.92B vision model that reads images and video on an 8 GB machine, with a documented tool-call format and thinking. It runs today in llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio, while vLLM and SGLang support is still unreleased. Transformers needs repository code, and there are no safety results, security contact or data sources.
Before you call either
Cola2
- Don't plan to use this as your model. It completes short prompts and wasn't tuned to follow instructions
- Don't use it commercially on the strength of this listing. The weights have no stated licence
- If you study it, read modeling_cola2.py first: trust_remote_code runs it
- Pin Transformers below 5, as the card requires
- Pass a seeded torch.Generator to generate(). Output varies between runs even with greedy decoding
- Check the download with
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
LFM3-VL-2B
- Start it with
llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-VL-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinjaorollama run lfm3-vl, with llama.cpp b11960 or later - Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1, per the card
- Video is sampled at 2 frames a second up to 768 frames, and each frame costs context. Video input in llama.cpp needs ffmpeg
- Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3-VL
- Validate JSON output yourself
- Liquid doesn't recommend it for coding, multi-turn conversations or complex reasoning
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Cola2 or LFM3-VL-2B?
LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/cola2-vs-lfm3-vl-2b.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/cola2.json·/api/v1/tools/lfm3-vl-2b.json - From a terminal
anchor compare cola2 lfm3-vl-2b(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "cola2", "b": "lfm3-vl-2b"}at/mcp, no key