Gemma 4 31B vs Qwen-VL

Gemma 4 31B is the largest dense model in Google's Gemma 4 family, built from the same research as Gemini 3 and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license. It supports a 256K token context window with text and image input, configurable thinking mode for step-by-step reasoning, and multilingual support across 140+ languages. The unquantized model fits on a single 80GB GPU.

For vision tasks, Gemma 4 31B supports image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and can output structured bounding boxes for UI element detection, making it useful for document parsing and UI understanding. Compared to Gemma 3, it delivers stronger reasoning and multimodal performance. It is part of a four-size family alongside the 26B A4B MoE variant and two on-device models (E2B, E4B), with the 31B dense variant optimized for output quality and fine-tuning over inference speed.

Qwen-VL is a large vision-language model released in August 2023 by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud. Built on the 7-billion-parameter Qwen language model with an added visual receptor based on Openclip ViT-bigG, the model accepts images, text, and bounding box coordinates as inputs, and can produce both text and bounding boxes as outputs. Qwen-VL processes images at 448×448 resolution, higher than the 224×224 input used by many contemporaneous vision-language models, which supports finer-grained visual recognition and text-heavy tasks such as OCR. This design supports a range of multimodal tasks in a single model, including image captioning, visual question answering, visual grounding, text recognition, and image-conditioned dialogue, with native support for English, Chinese, and multilingual conversation.

At release, Qwen-VL achieved competitive results against contemporaneous vision-language models across zero-shot captioning, general VQA, text-oriented VQA, and referring expression comprehension benchmarks. A chat-tuned variant, Qwen-VL-Chat, is optimized for interactive use with instruction-following and multi-turn conversation. The model is distributed under the Tongyi Qianwen License, a custom license from Alibaba Cloud with specific terms that should be reviewed prior to commercial use. Qwen-VL is the first generation of Alibaba's open multimodal series and precedes the later Qwen2-VL and Qwen2.5-VL releases.