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

LFM3-1.7B vs LFM3-VL-2B

LFM3-1.7B and LFM3-VL-2B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). LFM3-VL-2B leads on 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

LFM3-1.7B C

Best for Agents on a laptop, phone or small server that need tool calling and a long context from a model under 2 GB at 4 bits

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 100 against 90

Watch for

vLLM and SGLang have no released support, though the card lists both

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

  • Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 67

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.

Agent interface LFM3-1.7B +10

LFM3-1.7B 100

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, 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 the model was trained on tool calls and agentic traces and with reinforcement learning inside agent harnesses. Structured output 15, Liquid's API guide documents response_format with a JSON Schema, with lfm3-1.7b as the model in its examples, and says the schema is checked before generation starts. Reasoning control 10, the card documents enable_thinking=False in the chat template to turn reasoning off per request, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and preserve_thinking for earlier turns. Context 10, 256K tokens per the card, which says the mid-training stage extended the context window to 256K, and max_position_embeddings 262144 in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 100.

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.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-VL-2B +10

LFM3-1.7B 67

Model card 17, Intended use (local agents, tool calling, structured outputs, fine-tuning), a limitation (not recommended for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning), architecture (24 layers: 13 gated short convolutions, 5 sliding-window and 6 global attention), parameters (1.73B), context (256K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: 22T tokens of pre-training in two stages with the kinds of data added since LFM2, 1.75T tokens of supervised fine-tuning, then mixed reinforcement learning, distillation from six specialist teachers and agentic reinforcement learning. 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 10, Of the 22 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 8 November 2026), 7 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is some. 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 architecture, the 262,144-token context and the thinking switch. 17 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 67.

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.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-1.7BLFM3-VL-2BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258585even
Risk20%204040even
Agent interface10%1010090LFM3-1.7B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%106777LFM3-VL-2B +10
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-1.7BLFM3-VL-2B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AILiquid AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-11-092026-11-09
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked

Verdicts

LFM3-1.7B

A 1.73B model that fits an 8 GB machine with room to spare, with a documented tool-call format, deferred tools, a thinking switch and a 256K context. It runs today in llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio only, loads in Transformers through repository code, and has no safety results, security contact or data sources.

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

LFM3-1.7B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3
  2. Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1 for chat, tools and agents, per the card
  3. Pass enable_thinking=False for direct answers, and expect it to reason anyway on hard tasks
  4. For a large tool catalogue mark tools defer_loading and give it a search tool
  5. Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3
  6. Liquid doesn't recommend it for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning

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, LFM3-1.7B or LFM3-VL-2B?

LFM3-1.7B and LFM3-VL-2B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). LFM3-VL-2B leads on documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with LFM3-1.7B or LFM3-VL-2B

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