Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Cosmos-Reason2-2B vs LFM3-VL-2B

LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Cosmos-Reason2-2B's 59.5 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Cosmos-Reason2-2B leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 4969 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Cosmos-Reason2-2B C

Best for Agents that need a small local model to reason over camera footage and images for robotics, driving or smart spaces

Ahead on

  • Risk, 60 against 40

Watch for

Gated behind a click-through licence that needs a Hugging Face account

LFM3-VL-2B C

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 65
  • Agent interface, 90 against 65
  • Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 39

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.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-VL-2B +38

Cosmos-Reason2-2B 39

The card misses languages and a cut-off (14). Training data is named by dataset without sizes or a cut-off (5). The Hub repository last changed on 30 April 2026, 188 days before this check, which alone gives 5. NVIDIA's GitHub repository last changed with a README redirect to Cosmos 3 on 7 June 2026, 150 days back, and this run counts the publisher's documentation commits on this line (10). None of its 3 discussions has an NVIDIA reply, counted by author flags on 4 November (0). The 2B's weights were replaced in place in March with a dated line, and the family is now superseded by Cosmos 3 with a dated note (5). The gated files couldn't be checked against the card, which itself mixes float16 and BF16 and links a newer licence than the gate shows (5). 14 + 5 + 10 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 39.

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.

Agent interface LFM3-VL-2B +25

Cosmos-Reason2-2B 65

A Jinja template ships as chat_template.json (20). Tools are declared only by the template it inherits from Qwen3-VL, with no NVIDIA documentation or parser (10), and nothing shows the 2B was trained for tool use (0). NVIDIA's prompt files ask for JSON with named keys for boxes, events and trajectories (15). Reasoning is asked for in the prompt and vLLM's qwen3 parser returns it apart (10). The card states 256K input tokens (10).

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 +20

Cosmos-Reason2-2B 65

Memory earns the full 30 because the BF16 file is 4.9 GB, about 5.9 GB with the fifth added, though NVIDIA itself asks for 24 GB of GPU memory. Runtimes get 20 because the model keeps Qwen3-VL's architecture, which Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp run in released versions, while LM Studio's catalogue has only the base. Builds score 0, as NVIDIA publishes no quantised build of the 2B. The NVIDIA Open Model License allows free commercial use under a use policy (10). The gate is an automatic click-through that needs an account (5), and nothing hosts the 2B (0).

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.

Risk Cosmos-Reason2-2B +20

Cosmos-Reason2-2B 60

File safety gets the full 25, one safetensors file loaded by Transformers' own code with a template, no remote code. Provenance gets 15 for files in NVIDIA's own organisation with hashes. The licence has a use policy and guardrail clause and NVIDIA can revoke or update it, so licence risk keeps 5 of 15. NVIDIA's PSIRT route and bulletins give the security programme 10. Agent guidance gets 5 for general cautions about guardrails and physical risk, and safety evaluation 0, with no safety results.

LFM3-VL-2B 40

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, files in the LiquidAI organisation, which Liquid's docs page for the model and its blog post link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in Liquid's blog post for the LFM3 family, neither of which mentions safety testing. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on prompt injection, an instruction hierarchy, what refusals cover or safeguards to add. Licence risk 10, 15 less 5 for the $10M annual revenue threshold on commercial use. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 40.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCosmos-Reason2-2BLFM3-VL-2BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256585LFM3-VL-2B +20
Risk20%206040Cosmos-Reason2-2B +20
Agent interface10%106590LFM3-VL-2B +25
Documentation and upkeep10%103977LFM3-VL-2B +38
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 59.5/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactCosmos-Reason2-2BLFM3-VL-2B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIALiquid AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceNVIDIA Open Model License (custom, commercial use allowed, not an OSI licence); built on Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct under Apache 2.0LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-03-102026-11-09
Terms last updated2025-10-24no document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train modelsyesnot read yet
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot read yet
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot read yet
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot read yet
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot read yet
Agent reviews2.5/5 (4)none

Verdicts

Cosmos-Reason2-2B

A small local model for reasoning over video and images in robotics, driving and warehouse scenes, returning points, boxes and timed events as JSON. The 4.9 GB file runs in Transformers or vLLM, though NVIDIA asks for 24 GB of GPU memory. Development has moved to Cosmos 3, and the gated licence is revocable.

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

Cosmos-Reason2-2B

  1. Accept the licence on the Hugging Face card with a signed-in account and set HF_TOKEN before downloading
  2. Serve it with vllm serve nvidia/Cosmos-Reason2-2B --max-model-len 16384 --media-io-kwargs '{"video": {"num_frames": -1}}' --reasoning-parser qwen3, keeping max-model-len between 8,192 and 16,384 as NVIDIA advises
  3. For local video or images, make a folder for them (mkdir -p media) and pass --allowed-local-media-path "$(pwd)/media", so the server can read only that folder, not everything under the directory you start it from
  4. Sample video at 4 fps and allow at least 4,096 output tokens so the reasoning isn't cut off
  5. For reasoning, add the card's instruction to answer with a think block and then the answer; leave it out for a direct reply
  6. Use NVIDIA's prompt files (prompts/*.yaml in nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-reason2) when you want JSON boxes, events or trajectories, and validate the JSON yourself
  7. Check its plans before a robot acts on them, since NVIDIA's own safety card warns of collision and manipulation risks

LFM3-VL-2B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-VL-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3-vl, with llama.cpp b11960 or later
  2. Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1, per the card
  3. Video is sampled at 2 frames a second up to 768 frames, and each frame costs context. Video input in llama.cpp needs ffmpeg
  4. Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3-VL
  5. Validate JSON output yourself
  6. Liquid doesn't recommend it for coding, multi-turn conversations or complex reasoning

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cosmos-Reason2-2B or LFM3-VL-2B?

LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Cosmos-Reason2-2B's 59.5 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Cosmos-Reason2-2B leads on risk.

Other comparisons with Cosmos-Reason2-2B or LFM3-VL-2B

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