Gemma 4 12B vs Gemma 4 26B A4B

Gemma 4 12B is an open-weight multimodal model from Google in the Gemma 4 family. It is intended for text and image understanding tasks such as visual question answering, OCR, captioning, and document understanding, with a smaller parameter footprint than the larger Gemma 4 variants.

This entry is connected to Roboflow Playground vision evals for comparison. No runnable Playground workflow is configured yet, so the model page is used for discovery and benchmark context rather than direct hosted inference.

Gemma 4 26B A4B is the Mixture-of-Experts variant in Google's Gemma 4 family, with 25.2B total parameters but only 3.8B active per token. Built from the same Gemini 3 research as the 31B dense sibling and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license, it supports a 256K token context window with text and image input and configurable thinking mode. The "A4B" in the name refers to its approximately 4B active parameters. The MoE design makes it significantly faster at inference than the dense 31B, running nearly as fast as a 4B-parameter model while delivering roughly 97% of the dense model's quality.

For vision tasks, the 26B A4B shares the same multimodal capabilities as the 31B image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and structured bounding box output for UI element detection. The tradeoff versus the 31B dense model is a small quality reduction in exchange for much faster inference and lower hardware requirements, fitting in 18GB of VRAM at 4-bit quantization. It ranked #6 among open models on the Arena AI text leaderboard at launch.