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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B C

Best for Researchers and agents that want a small coding and terminal-agent model to fine-tune further, on a 24 GB GPU or larger.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 60 against 55
  • Agent interface, 70 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 40 against 31

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct C

Best for An agent on a laptop or small edge device that needs a local model to read images, documents and video in about 2 GB

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 70

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3-VL-2B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257095Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct +25
Risk20%206055MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +5
Agent interface10%107060MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%104031MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +9
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212025-11-01
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

A 9B cousin tuned on MiMo-V2.6's agent work for coding, terminal tasks and visual coding, released as a base for RL research. It needs about 23 GB in BF16, since Xiaomi ships no smaller build. The main risks are no safety results while a seventh of its tuning is offensive security, and nobody at Xiaomi answering reports.

Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

The smallest Qwen3-VL cousin, for reading screenshots, documents, charts and video on a laptop or edge box, running in about 2 GB from Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. Qwen hasn't answered repository questions or published safety work, so keep a human or a check in the loop before it drives a GUI.

Before you call either

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

  1. Serve it as the card does, sglang serve --model-path XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B --reasoning-parser mimo, and add --tool-call-parser mimo for parsed tool calls
  2. SGLang's mimo reasoning parser expects thinking to be asked for, so pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true, as the card does, and read reasoning_content
  3. Calls come back as function and parameter blocks inside tool_call, the same shape vLLM's and SGLang's qwen3_coder parsers read
  4. The generation config samples at temperature 0.6, top_k 20 and top_p 0.95
  5. Images and video go in through Qwen3.5's processor; the template's audio tokens have no audio encoder behind them
  6. The MTP head isn't in the files, so skip MTP speculative decoding even though config.json lists a layer
  7. It's an SFT checkpoint meant for further RL, and discussions report runaway generation on llama.cpp, so cap max_tokens

Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:2b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:2b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 2b-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, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct leads on reach.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

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