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

LFM3-Audio-2B vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

LFM3-Audio-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2's 54.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 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

LFM3-Audio-2B C

Best for Voice agents on a laptop or phone that need speech in, speech out and tool calls from one small model

Ahead on

  • Reach, 80 against 55
  • Agent interface, 85 against 75

Watch for

Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release, though the card lists vLLM and SGLang

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 C

Best for Pipelines with an NVIDIA GPU that need long scanned or rendered documents parsed in one pass, with page order, cross-page tables and boxes kept

Ahead on

  • Risk, 45 against 40

Watch for

Loading runs Baidu's code, remote code in Transformers or a prebuilt SGLang fork from the repository, and the save_results path calls eval on model output

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-Audio-2B +25

LFM3-Audio-2B 80

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB with its 0.17 GB projector file, and 1.27 GB × 1.2 = 1.5 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 10, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture with the LFM3 audio projector and speech output (src/models/lfm3.cpp and tools/mtmd at b12242, with a realtime client example that starts this model), and Ollama's library has an lfm3-audio entry. 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-audio-2b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 80.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 55

Memory earns the full 30, since the only build is 6.69 GB of BF16 weights that need about 8 GB with the fifth added. Runtimes score 0. Released vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23 and Transformers 5.22.1 know the first Unlimited-OCR but not the sparse attention this one adds, Baidu's own routes are remote code in Transformers and a customised SGLang wheel, llama.cpp b12111 has nothing for it, so Ollama has nothing either, and LM Studio couldn't be checked. Builds score 0, as Baidu publishes no quantised build (16 exist, all by others). Terms get 15 for MIT with nothing added. Download gets 10 for an ungated repository, and hosted too 0, with no inference provider mapped and the card's Baidu Cloud line unconfirmed.

Agent interface LFM3-Audio-2B +10

LFM3-Audio-2B 85

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (9,328 characters), with roles, audio, tools, deferred tools and tool results. 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 names turning spoken requests into tool calls as one of its four uses. Structured output 5, the card says the model is designed for structured outputs without saying how to ask for JSON. Liquid's API guide documents response_format with lfm3-1.7b as its example. Reasoning control 10, the card documents reasoning per request for text replies: the caller prefills the assistant turn with an open think tag to let the model reason, or a closed one for a direct answer, with a use_thinking example. Context 5, 32K tokens of input and output per the card. 20 + 25 + 20 + 5 + 10 + 5 = 85.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 75

Read for a document parser, the tool-calling, trained tool calling and structured-output lines stand for what it takes and returns. Baidu documents the page images, the prompt, the request settings and the block output, and ships a converter for the server's output (25). It was trained to read many pages in one request (20). The block format with classes, boxes and HTML tables, and its conversion to Markdown, are documented with how to get them (15). The prompt is built in code, with no Jinja template in the repository (10). Reasoning control scores 0, and the context 5, trained at up to 64K tokens.

Risk Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 +5

LFM3-Audio-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.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 45

File safety gets 15, safetensors only but loaded with trust_remote_code or through a prebuilt SGLang wheel from the repository. Provenance gets 15 for files in Baidu's verified organisation, linked from its GitHub organisation, with hashes for every file. Licence risk keeps 15, since MIT has none of the deductions. Safety evaluation, agent guidance and the security programme score 0, with no safety results, no cautions about use and no security contact found.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-Audio-2BBaidu Unlimited-OCR-2Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258055LFM3-Audio-2B +25
Risk20%204045Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 +5
Agent interface10%108575LFM3-Audio-2B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%105250LFM3-Audio-2B +2
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 54.2/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-Audio-2BBaidu Unlimited-OCR-2
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AIBaidu
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)MIT (Hub metadata; the Hugging Face repository has no LICENSE file, and the GitHub code repository's LICENSE is the MIT text, copyright 2026 Baidu)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-032026-10-26
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

LFM3-Audio-2B

A 2B model that listens and speaks on an 8 GB machine, transcribes and translates 19 languages and turns spoken requests into tool calls. Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release. The context is 32K, voice chat is English only, Liquid hasn't answered the repository's questions, and there are no safety results or data sources.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

An MIT document parser of 3.3B parameters that reads up to hundreds of pages in one request and returns ordered layout blocks with boxes and HTML tables. ParseBench's independent run puts content faithfulness at 89.16 and charts at 1.06. It needs an NVIDIA GPU with about 12 GB and runs only through Baidu's remote code or its own SGLang build.

Before you call either

LFM3-Audio-2B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-Audio-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3-audio
  2. llama.cpp ships examples/realtime_client.py for live speech with this model
  3. Prefill the assistant turn with an open think tag to let it reason before a text reply
  4. The context is 32K
  5. Voice chat is English only, while transcription, synthesis and translation cover 19 languages and locales
  6. Liquid doesn't recommend it for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

  1. Quickest local run, pip install torch==2.13.0 torchvision pillow transformers==4.52.1 huggingface-hub==0.36.0 tokenizers==0.21.4 addict==2.4.0 einops==0.8.2 easydict==1.13, then AutoModel.from_pretrained("baidu/Unlimited-OCR-2", trust_remote_code=True, use_safetensors=True, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16).eval().cuda() and model.infer_multi(tokenizer, image_files=pages, output_path="out")
  2. To serve it, download the repository, install wheel/sglang-0.5.20.dev13+g75b9b06b02-py3-none-any.whl with pymupdf and fastokens in a Python 3.10 venv, and start python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path baidu/Unlimited-OCR-2 --chat-template unlimited-ocr --enable-custom-logit-processor --enable-streaming-session --disable-radix-cache --mem-fraction-static 0.7 --max-prefill-tokens 2048 with the SGLANG_UOCR_ variables from the card
  3. Send all pages of a document in one request, images first, then the text <PAGE><image> repeated per page and Multi page parsing., with temperature 0, skip_special_tokens false, max_tokens of about 8,000 per page and the DeepseekOCRNoRepeatNGramLogitProcessor (ngram_size 35, window_size 1024 for several pages)
  4. The output is layout blocks, not Markdown; run utils/process_unlimitedOCR2.py from github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR, or convert(raw_output) in Python, to get Markdown with HTML tables
  5. Render PDFs to images first (the card uses PyMuPDF at 300 DPI), keep save_results off for untrusted documents, and treat extracted text as untrusted before passing it to another model

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-Audio-2B or Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2?

LFM3-Audio-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2's 54.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 leads on risk.

Other comparisons with LFM3-Audio-2B or Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

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