LFM2‑VL is Liquid AI's first series of multimodal models, designed to process text and images with variable resolutions. Built on the LFM2 backbone, it is optimized for low-latency and edge AI applications.
We're releasing the weights of two post-trained checkpoints with 450M (for highly constrained devices) and 1.6B (more capable yet still lightweight) parameters.
2× faster inference speed on GPUs compared to existing VLMs while maintaining competitive accuracy
Flexible architecture with user-tunable speed-quality tradeoffs at inference time
Native resolution processing up to 512×512 with intelligent patch-based handling for larger images, avoiding upscaling and distortion
Find more about our vision-language model in the LFM2-VL post and its language backbone in the LFM2 blog post.
Due to their small size, we recommend fine-tuning LFM2-VL models on narrow use cases to maximize performance. They were trained for instruction following and lightweight agentic flows. Not intended for safety‑critical decisions.
Chat template: LFM2-VL uses a ChatML-like chat template as follows:
<|startoftext|><|im_start|>system
You are a helpful multimodal assistant by Liquid AI.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>user
<image>Describe this image.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant
This image shows a Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) nematode.<|im_end|>
Images are referenced with a sentinel (<image>), which is automatically replaced with the image tokens by the processor.
You can apply it using the dedicated .apply_chat_template() function from Hugging Face transformers.
Architecture
Hybrid backbone: Language model tower (LFM2-1.2B or LFM2-350M) paired with SigLIP2 NaFlex vision encoders (400M shape-optimized or 86M base variant)
Native resolution processing: Handles images up to 512×512 pixels without upscaling and preserves non-standard aspect ratios without distortion
Tiling strategy: Splits large images into non-overlapping 512×512 patches and includes thumbnail encoding for global context (in 1.6B model)
# custom terms: read the license before you download$ fw get onnx-community/LFM2-VL-450M-ONNX
# manifest sha256 33623e496aa9… · 4.48 GB · 39 files$ fw verify ./LFM2-VL-450M-ONNX onnx-community/LFM2-VL-450M-ONNX
Terms that come with these files. LFM 1.0: commercial use only for organisations under US$10M annual revenue. Keep a copy of the license with the files.
Custom license (custom).Read the license text first. Open this panel to show the commands once you accept its terms.
fw.pyChecks the signature and every sha256, tries each source in order, resumes.