DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs LFM3-VL-2B

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 48

The cards cover architecture, parameters and context but not intended use, limitations, languages or a cut-off, so 8. Training data is a general description with no cut-off, which caps it at 5. The files changed on 16 and 17 October and DeepSeek's deepseek-recipe 0.2.0 changed the V4.1 prompt encoding on 20 October, inside 30 days (20). None of the 40 most recent questions across both repositories had a DeepSeek reply (0). Every release keeps its own repository and the update names what it replaces (10). File health loses 5 for an open, unanswered pull request saying the September template trails the encoding changes. 8 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 10 + 5 = 48.

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.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 60

Memory scores nothing, because the only build is DeepSeek's own at 510.3 GB, about 612 GB with the fifth added, and nobody's runtime library holds a smaller one at 4-bit or better. Four runtimes run it in a released version (5 each), vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23, which maps the V4.1 architecture name onto its V4 model, llama.cpp from b11870 (25 October 2026), which added the deepseek41 architecture and its converter, and Ollama 0.40.14, which builds llama.cpp b11963. Transformers 5.22.1 and LM Studio don't (0 each). The release itself is one quantised build, FP8 with FP4 experts (10). MIT with nothing added earns the full terms line (15), the repositories aren't gated (10), and Hugging Face maps three live inference providers for the update (5). 0 + 20 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 60.

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.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 75

There's no Jinja template in the 17 October repository, only code to run, so the template line gets 10. DeepSeek documents the DSML tool format both ways and ships its own parser in encoding.py and deepseek-recipe, but names no parser in a runtime (10, read as for DeepSeek-V3.2 and V4-Flash-0731), and one block can carry several calls (20). deepseek-recipe documents JSON Schema output via response_format (15). Thinking turns off in chat mode and takes an effort budget from 1 to 100, with reasoning returned in think tags (10). The 1M context was trained in (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.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 50

The weights are safetensors only, but 10 comes off because the card's way to build prompts is running encoding.py from the repository, since there's no Jinja template. The files sit in DeepSeek's own organisation with a hash for every file. Nothing is published on safety and there's no guidance for agent use, so those two lines score 0. The security programme earns 5 for the security@deepseek.com reporting address in DeepSeek's site footer, read as for DeepSeek-V3.2, with no security.txt and no public advisories. The MIT licence carries no use policy, threshold or revocation, so licence risk keeps all 15.

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.