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

LFM3-Omni-2B vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

LFM3-Omni-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct's 52.6 (D), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct leads on reach and 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-Omni-2B C

Best for Voice and camera agents on a laptop or phone that want one small model for hearing, seeing, speaking and calling tools

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 70 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 49 against 31

Watch for

Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct D

Best for An agent with 4 GB or more to spare that needs a local model to read images, documents and video

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 80
  • Risk, 55 against 40

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

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-Omni-2B +18

LFM3-Omni-2B 49

Model card 14, Intended use (one on-device model in place of separate speech recognition, vision, language and speech models), architecture, parameters (2.17B), context (32K) and the text and speech languages. Training data 5, the card has no training section. Last change 20, the last commit, on 3 November 2026, changed the card's navigation icons, seven days before this check, and the one before it, on 28 October, documented video frame rate and frame limits. Responsiveness 0, none of the 12 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 9 November 2026) has a reply from a LiquidAI member. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 5, the card gives a 32K context while config.json gives the language model 128,000 positions and Liquid's API lists 128,000 for the hosted model, so the card and the files don't agree on context. 14 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 49.

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct 31

The card misses limitations, languages and a cut-off (11). Training data is described only in the technical report, with no cut-off (5). The last change to code that runs it was the qwen-vl-utils fix of 4 January 2026, and the weights haven't changed since November 2025 (5). Qwen answered none of the 14 Hugging Face discussions that aren't pull requests, counted on 4 November 2026 (0), and GitHub issues weren't counted. Earlier versions kept in their own repositories without notes (5). Two reports wait without a reply (5). 11+5+5+0+5+5 = 31.

Reach Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct +15

LFM3-Omni-2B 80

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB with its 0.29 GB projector file, and 1.39 GB × 1.2 = 1.7 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 10, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture with the LFM3 vision and audio projectors and speech output (src/models/lfm3.cpp and tools/mtmd at b12242, with a realtime client example), and Ollama's library has an lfm3-omni 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-omni-2b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 80.

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct 95

Alibaba's own Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file is 2.95 GB, so with a fifth added it needs about 3.5 GB and fits well within 16 GB (30). Transformers 4.57.0, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp run it in released versions, and Ollama through its pinned llama.cpp build, which reaches the 25 cap (25). Alibaba publishes FP8 and GGUF builds at F16, Q8_0 and Q4_K_M (15). Apache 2.0 with nothing added (15). No gate and no account (10). Only Featherless is live in the Hub's provider mapping, so it isn't hosted too (0). 30+25+15+15+10+0 = 95.

Risk Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct +15

LFM3-Omni-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.

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct 55

Safetensors and GGUF only and no code in the repositories, so the FP8 card's trust_remote_code flag runs nothing (25). Files in the Qwen organisation with a checksum on every file (15). No safety evaluation at all (0). No guidance for agent use, which matters for a model sold as a GUI agent (0). Apache 2.0 carries none of the licence risks (15). No security contact, disclosure policy or public advisories found for Qwen (0), and Alibaba's group-wide security centre wasn't checked. 25+15+0+0+15+0 = 55.

Agent interface LFM3-Omni-2B +10

LFM3-Omni-2B 70

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (13,513 characters), with roles, images, video and 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 documents tool calling from spoken or written requests. Structured output 0, the card doesn't mention JSON or structured output for this model. Reasoning control 0, the card says this is a non-reasoning model and that enable_thinking=True is not supported, so there is no thinking to turn off or budget. Context 5, 32K tokens of input and output per the card. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 5 = 70.

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct 60

A Jinja chat template in the repository (20). The tool-call format lives only in the template, Hermes-style JSON in tool_call tags, and Alibaba names no parser (10). Trained for function calling with several calls allowed in a turn, per the family's technical report (20). No documented structured output (0). No thinking mode in this edition, so reasoning control scores 0 by the rule. 262,144 tokens of native context (10). 20+10+20+0+0+10 = 60.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-Omni-2BQwen3-VL-4B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258095Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct +15
Risk20%204055Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct +15
Agent interface10%107060LFM3-Omni-2B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%104931LFM3-Omni-2B +18
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100D 52.6/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-Omni-2BQwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AIAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-032025-11-01
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

LFM3-Omni-2B

One 2.17B model that sees, listens and talks on an 8 GB machine and turns spoken requests into tool calls. Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release. The context is 32K, it doesn't reason, Liquid hasn't answered a question on the repository, and there are no safety results or data sources.

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct reads screenshots, documents, charts and video, and Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 3.5 GB. Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp and Ollama run it under plain Apache 2.0. It has no thinking mode, documents tool calls only in the template, and Qwen hasn't answered repository questions or published safety work, so add guardrails before it drives a GUI.

Before you call either

LFM3-Omni-2B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-Omni-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3-omni
  2. Greedy decoding for text. For speech use audio_temperature 0.4 and audio_repetition_penalty 1.2, per the card
  3. The context is 32K, and llama.cpp samples video at 2 frames a second up to 384 frames
  4. Parse tool calls yourself from the XML it returns
  5. It doesn't reason, so don't pass enable_thinking
  6. Validate JSON output yourself

Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:4b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:4b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 4b-instruct
  3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
  4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
  5. Use the card's sampling, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 for vision and temperature=1.0, top_p=1.0, top_k=40, presence_penalty=2.0 for text
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later and Transformers 4.57.0 or later

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-Omni-2B or Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct?

LFM3-Omni-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct's 52.6 (D), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct leads on reach and risk.

Other comparisons with LFM3-Omni-2B or Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

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