LFM3-VL-2B vs Qwen3.5-9B

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.

Qwen3.5-9B 34

Model card 14, it covers intended use, architecture, parameters, context and 201 languages but gives no limitations and no knowledge cut-off. Training data 5, a general line about trillions of multimodal tokens with no cut-off. Last change 5, the files and card last changed on 2 March 2026 (c202236), 247 days before 4 November, within a year. Responsiveness 0, no Qwen member replied in any of the 40 most recent of the 45 discussions that aren't pull requests (2 March to 29 September 2026). Version policy 5, a first release that was never replaced in place, with no dated notes across generations. File health 5, two reports about the files and card (15 and 51) are still open with no reply. 14 + 5 + 5 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 34. The card's highlights mention sparse Mixture-of-Experts for the series while this 9B is dense, but its own overview matches config.json, so it's not counted as a contradiction.

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.

Qwen3.5-9B 70

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 10, the card names the qwen3_coder parser for vLLM and SGLang but leaves the declaration and return format to the template, and Qwen's own function-calling guide still describes Qwen3's Hermes format. Trained tool calling 20, the template renders several calls in one turn. Structured output 0, nothing documents asking the weights for JSON. Reasoning control 10, thinking turns off per request with enable_thinking false and the reasoning comes back in think tags that the qwen3 parser splits out. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native.

LFM3-VL-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.

Qwen3.5-9B 55

File safety 25, safetensors only and nothing from the repository runs on load or to build prompts. Provenance 15, the Qwen organisation linked from Alibaba's QwenLM README, with a SHA-256 for every shard. Safety evaluation 0, none on the card, and the Qwen3.5 blog couldn't be read, so this is couldn't check scored as absent. Agent guidance 0, the card has no prompt-injection guidance, refusal scope or cautions. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 with nothing added and a working licence link. Security programme 0, no SECURITY.md in Qwen's GitHub repositories, no security.txt on qwen.ai or alibabacloud.com, and whether Alibaba's group security centre takes reports about Qwen models couldn't be checked.