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

LFM3-1.7B vs MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL

LFM3-1.7B and MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 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

  • Reach, 85 against 65
  • Agent interface, 100 against 85
  • Documentation and upkeep, 67 against 59

Watch for

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

MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL C

Best for Teams with a GPU server, or a provider account, that want an open agent model with a very long context

Ahead on

  • Risk, 45 against 40

Watch for

178 GB at 4 bits, so it needs about 200 GB of memory

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.

Reach LFM3-1.7B +20

LFM3-1.7B 85

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB, and 1.10 GB × 1.2 = 1.3 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 15, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture (src/models/lfm3.cpp at b12242), Ollama's library has an lfm3 entry, and LM Studio's catalogue runs the architecture (its liquid/lfm3-vl-2b entry; lmstudio-community publishes a GGUF of this model). 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 lfm3-1.7b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 85.

MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL 65

Memory 5, the smallest build at 4 bits or better is ggml-org's MXFP4 GGUF, 168.93 GB with its projector, and 168.93 GB × 1.2 = 202.7 GB, within 256 GB. Xiaomi's own files are 177.74 GB. ggml-org's Q2_K is below 4 bits and isn't read. Runtimes 20, Released vLLM 0.33.0 and SGLang 0.5.23 have the mimo_v2 model and the mimo parsers, Transformers 5.22.2 has a mimo_v2_flash model, and llama.cpp b12242 has the architecture, with a GGUF from its own organisation. Builds 10, one precision from Xiaomi, the 4-bit files it releases. Terms 15, MIT in the card's metadata, an OSI licence. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, the card says it is on Xiaomi's MiMo Open Platform API and on OpenRouter, and Novita is live for it on Hugging Face. 5 + 20 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 65.

Agent interface LFM3-1.7B +15

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.

MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL 85

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (3,868 characters), with a copy in tokenizer_config.json. Tool-calling format 25, the card names the parser to use in two runtimes: the mimo tool-call parser in SGLang and in vLLM, with auto tool choice, and both ship it in a release. Trained tool calling 20, the card describes reinforcement learning on coding and general agent tasks across several harnesses, and the template renders every call in a turn. Structured output 0, Nothing on the card about JSON or schema-constrained output. Reasoning control 10, the template has an enable_thinking switch and keeps reasoning_content, and the card names the mimo reasoning parser for SGLang and vLLM, which returns the reasoning apart from the answer. Context 10, 1M tokens per the card's model summary, and 1,048,576 positions in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 85.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-1.7B +8

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.

MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL 59

Model card 14, Intended use, the architecture, the parameters, the context and the languages (in the metadata) are on the card. Training data 5, A description of the training method with no data sources, sizes or cut-off. Last change 20, the last commits, on 28 October 2026, updated the card, 13 days before this check. Responsiveness 5, Of the 13 most recent discussions that aren't pull requests (21 September to 6 November 2026), 3 have a reply from a XiaomiMiMo member, which is a few. Version policy 5, MiMo-V2.5 stays in its own repositories and V2.6 came out in new ones, with no dated note on the older cards that we read. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the architecture and the 1M context, and two early faults (invalid JSON in the draft model's config, preprocessor values) were fixed in commits that say so. 14 + 5 + 20 + 5 + 5 + 10 = 59.

Risk MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL +5

LFM3-1.7B 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.

MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL 45

File safety 5, the weights are safetensors, but the dflash folder's mask_embedding.pt is a pickle beside them (15). Provenance 15, the files sit in the XiaomiMiMo organisation, which mimo.xiaomi.com links to per the Distill listing (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 5, General cautions only. Licence risk 15, MIT has no use policy, threshold or change clause. Security programme 5, Xiaomi runs a company security centre for reporting flaws, as read for the Distill listing (5). 5 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 15 + 5 = 45.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-1.7BMiMo-V2.6-Flash-RLEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258565LFM3-1.7B +20
Risk20%204045MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL +5
Agent interface10%1010085LFM3-1.7B +15
Documentation and upkeep10%106759LFM3-1.7B +8
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-1.7BMiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AIXiaomi (MiMo team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)MIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-092026-10-28
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.

MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL

A large agent model with an open licence: text, images, video and audio, a 1M context, tool calling it was trained for, and code in four released runtimes. It's a server model, 178 GB at 4 bits, and the card's commands run the repository's code. No safety results, little said about data, and few questions answered.

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

MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL

  1. Plan for a provider unless you have a multi-GPU server: Xiaomi's API platform, OpenRouter or Novita
  2. On SGLang or vLLM pass --tool-call-parser mimo --reasoning-parser mimo
  3. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95, as the card recommends
  4. The card's commands pass trust-remote-code. Read the repository's three Python files first, or use Transformers 5.22.2, which has the model built in
  5. Skip the dflash folder unless you need speculative decoding. Its mask_embedding.pt is a pickle
  6. The Use Restrictions section asks for human oversight of high-risk actions

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-1.7B or MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL?

LFM3-1.7B and MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL leads on risk.

Other comparisons with LFM3-1.7B or MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.