Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs Qwen3.6 27B

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397B-parameter (17B active) open-weight multimodal model developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team, released on 2026-02-16 under Apache-2.0. It supports text and image inputs with text outputs, combining a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture with Gated Delta Networks for efficient scaling. The model provides native vision-language reasoning and a large ~262K token context window, extendable to ~1M tokens.

As the first open-weight release in the Qwen3.5 family, it positions itself as a high-capacity, long-context alternative in the large vision-language space, balancing scale and efficiency via sparse activation. It is designed for advanced reasoning, coding, agent workflows, and multimodal understanding tasks.

Qwen3.6-27B is a dense 27-billion-parameter multimodal language model developed by Alibaba's Qwen team and released on April 22, 2026. It combines a causal language model with an integrated vision encoder, supporting text, image, and video inputs natively. The architecture employs a hybrid attention design that interleaves Gated DeltaNet linear attention blocks with standard Gated Attention layers across 64 transformer layers with a hidden dimension of 5,120. Unlike Mixture-of-Experts variants in the Qwen3.6 family, all 27 billion parameters are active on every inference pass, simplifying deployment and quantization. The model supports a native context window of 262,144 tokens, extensible to approximately 1,010,000 tokens via YaRN scaling. It is released under the Apache 2.0 license with open weights available on Hugging Face and ModelScope.

The model introduces two notable capabilities relative to prior Qwen releases: enhanced agentic coding support covering frontend workflows and repository-level reasoning, and a Thinking Preservation mechanism that retains chain-of-thought reasoning context across multi-turn conversation history to reduce redundant token generation in iterative agent sessions. It supports both a thinking mode for multi-step reasoning and a non-thinking mode for faster responses within a single model. On coding benchmarks, Qwen reports scores of 77.2 on SWE-bench Verified, 59.3 on Terminal-Bench 2.0, and 48.2 on SkillsBench. Vision capabilities include chart understanding (CharXiv RQ: 78.4), OCR (CC-OCR: 81.2), and video understanding (VideoMME with subtitles: 87.7).