LFM3-VL-2B vs MiniCPM-o 4.5

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.

MiniCPM-o 4.5 35

Chat template 20, a Jinja template in the tokenizer config. Tool-calling format 10 of 25, only the inherited Qwen3 template says how tools work. Trained tool calling 0, OpenBMB never mentions tool use. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, thinking turns on and off per request but nobody says where the reasoning comes back. Context 5, 40,960 tokens. Read as an omni model, it takes images, video and audio and returns text and streaming speech, which the card documents with code.

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.

MiniCPM-o 4.5 66

Model card 11 of 20, limitations, context length and a knowledge cut-off are missing. Training data 5, described by kind without sources, sizes or a cut-off. Last change 20, the card changed on 24 October 2026. Responsiveness 10, OpenBMB answered half of the 12 questions. Version policy 10, earlier models stay in their own repositories and releases are dated. File health 10, the files agree and the two bug reports have replies.

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.

MiniCPM-o 4.5 90

Memory 30, OpenBMB's 4-bit GGUF with its vision file is 5.9 GB, about 7 GB with a fifth added. Runtimes 15 of 25, released vLLM, llama.cpp and Ollama run it, while Transformers 5.22.1 still needs OpenBMB's remote code and SGLang 0.5.23 supports only the older 2.6. Builds 15, GGUF at several precisions plus AWQ and GPTQ. Terms 15, plain Apache 2.0. Download 10, nothing gated. Hosted 5, OpenBMB's own API serves it.