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

Gemma 4 31B IT vs LFM3-VL-2B

Gemma 4 31B IT scores 74.1 (BB) on agent readiness against LFM3-VL-2B's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. LFM3-VL-2B leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep. 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

Gemma 4 31B IT BB

Best for An agent with a 24 GB GPU or more that wants a dense multimodal cousin with tool calling under a plain licence

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 85
  • Risk, 70 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better

Watch for

No safety evaluation results published

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

  • Agent interface, 90 against 85
  • Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 65

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.

Risk Gemma 4 31B IT +30

Gemma 4 31B IT 70

File safety 25, safetensors only and no code from the repository runs to load it or build prompts. Provenance 15, the files come from the google organisation that gemma.ai links to, with a SHA-256 for every weight file and a git hash for every file. Safety evaluation 0, Google says violations were minimal but publishes no results. Agent guidance 10, the card says what its safety training covers and asks for content safeguards, and the tool guide says to validate calls, but there is no prompt-injection guidance. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 carries none of the deductions and its link works. Security programme 5, Google's company-wide security.txt and reward programme exist but nothing ties them to Gemma, and no public advisories were found.

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.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-VL-2B +12

Gemma 4 31B IT 65

Model card 20, all seven items are there, with languages given as counts. Training data 10, a general description with a January 2025 cut-off. Last change 10, the files last changed on 20 July, 104 days before 1 November, and Google's reference code for Gemma 4 last changed in a way that runs this model on 6 July, both inside 180 days. Responsiveness 10, Google answered 14 of the last 40 discussions, none since 30 July. Version policy 10, earlier generations are kept in their own repositories with dated releases. File health 5, two template reports wait without a reply.

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.

Reach Gemma 4 31B IT +10

Gemma 4 31B IT 95

Memory 25, Google's own QAT Q4_0 GGUF is 17.7 GB, which with a fifth added comes to about 21 GB and fits a 24 GB card even with the vision projector. Runtimes 25, released code in llama.cpp, Ollama's library, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers fills the cap without LM Studio, which only Google's guides name. Builds 15, Google ships a 4-bit GGUF and a 4-bit compressed-tensors build, read as two of the kinds the checklist names. Terms 15, plain Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, no gate and no account. Hosted 5, Google's Gemini API serves it today.

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.

Agent interface LFM3-VL-2B +5

Gemma 4 31B IT 85

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, Google documents the declaration and call syntax and ships a response schema that Transformers parses. Trained tool calling 20, several calls and responses in one turn. Structured output 0, Google documents none and the card doesn't claim it. Reasoning control 10, thinking turns on or off per request and comes back in its own block. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native.

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.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGemma 4 31B ITLFM3-VL-2BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259585Gemma 4 31B IT +10
Risk20%207040Gemma 4 31B IT +30
Agent interface10%108590LFM3-VL-2B +5
Documentation and upkeep10%106577LFM3-VL-2B +12
Negative events≤1500
TotalBB 74.1/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactGemma 4 31B ITLFM3-VL-2B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorGoogle DeepMindLiquid AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-07-202026-11-09
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews3.8/5 (4)none

Verdicts

Gemma 4 31B IT

A dense multimodal cousin with documented tool calling, optional thinking and a 256K context, for general agent work and image reading on one 24 GB GPU through Google's 4-bit build. It runs in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. The main risk is that Google publishes no safety results and has gone quiet on the repository since July.

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

Gemma 4 31B IT

  1. On the reference machine run llama-server -hf google/gemma-4-31B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf --hf-file gemma-4-31B_q4_0-it.gguf --jinja -c 32768, adding gemma-4-31B-it-mmproj.gguf for images
  2. Or ollama run gemma4:31b for the 20 GB Q4_K_M build
  3. In vLLM serve with --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4, as vLLM's recipe does
  4. Thinking is off by default, so pass enable_thinking: true in chat_template_kwargs to turn it on, and expect the reasoning in the thought channel block
  5. Drop earlier thoughts from the history except on tool-call turns, as the card asks
  6. Use the card's sampling, temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 64
  7. Validate function names and arguments before running a call, and check JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding
  8. The w4a16 build relies on Marlin INT4 kernels that vLLM marks unsupported on AMD, so use the GGUF on the reference machine

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, Gemma 4 31B IT or LFM3-VL-2B?

Gemma 4 31B IT scores 74.1 (BB) on agent readiness against LFM3-VL-2B's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. LFM3-VL-2B leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

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