Gemma 4 E2B IT vs Kronos

Gemma 4 E2B IT

A small cousin for light agent work, tool-calling loops, transcription and image reading on a phone or laptop, under Apache 2.0. Google's 4-bit build needs about 5 GB with working space and runs in all the common runtimes. Google's card puts it far below larger Gemma 4 sizes on agent and coding tasks, with no published safety results.

Kronos

Forecasts the next price bars from a history of up to 512 candlestick bars. Every size fits in under 0.5 GB and runs on a CPU, but only through the publisher's own Python package. Nobody has benchmarked it independently, its quickstart data was deleted from the repository, and the publisher hasn't replied since November 2025.

Gemma 4 E2B IT

1. On the reference machine run llama-server -hf google/gemma-4-E2B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf --hf-file gemma-4-E2B_q4_0-it.gguf --jinja -c 131072, and add --mmproj with gemma-4-E2B-it-mmproj.gguf for images and audio
2. With Ollama run ollama run gemma4:e2b and raise num_ctx or OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH, since the default context is small and agents want at least 64K
3. In vLLM or SGLang pass --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4 (vLLM also --enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as text; Google's w4a16 build is the 4-bit route there
4. Thinking is off by default; pass enable_thinking=True or start the system prompt with <|think|>, and drop earlier turns' thinking from history except on tool-call turns
5. Put images before the text and audio after it, keep audio to 30 seconds and video to 60 frames, and validate tool names and arguments before running them

Kronos

1. Clone https://github.com/shiyu-coder/Kronos and pip install -r requirements.txt, then load Kronos.from_pretrained("NeoQuasar/Kronos-small") and KronosTokenizer.from_pretrained("NeoQuasar/Kronos-Tokenizer-base") and wrap them in KronosPredictor
2. Pair Kronos-mini with Kronos-Tokenizer-2k and Kronos-small or Kronos-base with Kronos-Tokenizer-base, the cards' pairing
3. The examples read examples/data/XSHG_5min_600977.csv, which no longer exists; point them at tests/data/regression_input.csv, 2,500 five-minute bars
4. Keep the lookback at or under max_context, 512 bars, and pass the future timestamps you want as y_timestamp, since the calendar fields come from them
5. Raise sample_count for a steadier forecast, but expect only the mean back; call the lower-level auto_regressive_inference yourself if you need the paths
6. Treat forecasts as model output to check, not signals; the README says its own backtest pipeline isn't a production trading system