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

LBS-27B vs LFM3-VL-2B

LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against LBS-27B's 55.8 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. LBS-27B 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

LBS-27B C

Best for Agents with about 96 GB of GPU memory that need to find click targets on dense professional screenshots, or read fine detail in large images, and can run a small crop loop and wait for independent results.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 50 against 40

Watch for

No independent benchmark result yet; ScreenSpot-Pro, OS-World-G, PerceptionBench and HR-Bench numbers are inclusionAI's own runs

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 60
  • Agent interface, 90 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 43

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 +34

LBS-27B 43

The model card earns 8, with intended use, one limitation and parameters, and no architecture, context, languages or cut-off. Training data earns 5 for a general description of synthetic GUI data with no cut-off. Last change earns 20 for 26 October 2026. Responsiveness earns 0, the one discussion unanswered. Version policy earns 5 for a first release. File health earns 5, as the config still sets an MTP layer the weights lack and the card names a reasoning setting the template refuses.

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 LFM3-VL-2B +25

LBS-27B 60

Memory earns 10, since the only build is 54.73 GB of BF16, about 66 GB with a fifth added, which fits the reference machine but not 64 GB. Runtimes earn 25 from released vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp, which all carry Qwen3.8-27B's architecture, and Ollama through the llama.cpp release it pins, so 25. Builds earn 0, as inclusionAI publishes no quantised build and the GGUF copies are bartowski's and mradermacher's. Terms earn 15 for Apache 2.0 with nothing added, on the weights and on the base. Download earns 10, with no gate. Hosted earns 0, as no provider or inclusionAI API serves it.

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 +20

LBS-27B 70

The chat template earns 20, Qwen's Jinja file in the repository. The tool-calling format earns 10, as general tool calls rest on the inherited template and the crop action is parsed by inclusionAI's own code, not a runtime parser. Trained tool calling earns 20 for up to two crop actions per turn learned in GRPO. Structured output earns 0. Reasoning control earns 10, with reasoning effort documented and the reasoning shown as think text. Context earns 10 for 262,144 tokens with no scaling.

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.

Risk LBS-27B +10

LBS-27B 50

File safety earns 15, safetensors only but with the documented route running the publisher's scripts to serve it and to write its system prompt. Provenance earns 15, inclusionAI's own organisation with a hash for every file. Safety evaluation and agent guidance earn 0, as nothing is published on either, prompt injection through screenshots included. Licence risk keeps all 15 under Apache 2.0. The security programme earns 5 for Ant Group's AntSRC, which isn't linked to the model.

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 runLBS-27BLFM3-VL-2BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256085LFM3-VL-2B +25
Risk20%205040LBS-27B +10
Agent interface10%107090LFM3-VL-2B +20
Documentation and upkeep10%104377LFM3-VL-2B +34
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55.8/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactLBS-27BLFM3-VL-2B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorinclusionAI (Ant Group)Liquid AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0 (the card's metadata and licence section; the LICENSE file sits in the GitHub repository inclusionAI/UI-Venus on its LBS branch, not in the Hugging Face repository)LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-10-262026-11-09
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

LBS-27B

A 27B Qwen3.8 fine-tune for GUI grounding that zooms into screenshots over a few turns before naming a point, and inclusionAI says it also helps with fine detail in large images. It needs about 96 GB at BF16 and a client that runs its crop actions. Every result so far is inclusionAI's own, with no safety results or injection guidance.

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

LBS-27B

  1. Serve with vllm serve inclusionAI/LBS-27B --tensor-parallel-size 4 --max-model-len 65536, which is what the card's wrapper script runs; keep the context at 32,768 or more for multi-turn images
  2. Build the system prompt with build_system_prompt from the LBS branch's zoomin_grounding_protocol.py, send the screenshot after image_path: <name>, and don't pass tools; the model answers in plain text
  3. Parse <action>crop_image(image_path=..., x1=..., y1=..., x2=..., y2=...)</action>, cut the crop yourself and return it with its mapping to the original image; allow at most two crops per turn and three per episode
  4. Read the final answer as [x.xx,y.yy] on a 0 to 1000 scale of the original image, and use your own executor to click
  5. Pass reasoning_effort as xhigh, medium or low only, since the template raises an error for high, and don't count on thinking_budget, which the template ignores
  6. Don't turn on MTP speculative decoding; the MTP weights aren't in the repository though config.json names one MTP layer

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, LBS-27B or LFM3-VL-2B?

LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against LBS-27B's 55.8 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. LBS-27B leads on risk.

Other comparisons with LBS-27B or LFM3-VL-2B

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