Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs SAM 3
Qwen3.6 35B A3B: 64.8% average across four Vision Evals tasks (#30 of 65 models). We have not run SAM 3 through Roboflow's Vision Evals, so there is no head-to-head score. Run both on your own image below.
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Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs SAM 3 Comparison Table
Evals updated October 26, 2026Pricing updated November 8, 2026
| Property | Qwen3.6 35B A3B | SAM 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Qwen | Meta |
| Category | open | open |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Apr 2026 | Nov 2025 |
| Context Window | 262K | — |
| Parameters | 35B total, 3B active | Unknown |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Custom |
| Commercial use | free for commercial use | See license terms |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $0.100 | No published price |
| Output $/1M | $0.900 | No published price |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Captioning | Demo | Not listed |
| Chart Question Answering | Supported | Not listed |
| Classification | Demo | Not listed |
| Document Question Answering | Supported | Not listed |
| Image Tagging | Supported | Not listed |
| Instance Segmentation | Not listed | Supported |
| Multi-Label Classification | Supported | Not listed |
| OCR | Demo | Not listed |
| Open Vocabulary Object Detection | Not listed | Supported |
| Phrase Grounding | Supported | Not listed |
| Promptable Concept Segmentation | Not listed | Demo |
| Video Classification | Supported | Not listed |
| Video Object Tracking | Not listed | Supported |
| Vision Language | Supported | Not listed |
| Visual Question Answering | Demo | Not listed |
| Zero Shot Segmentation | Not listed | Supported |
Both support 1 more task | ||
| Model Features | ||
| LLMs with Vision Capabilities | Supported | Not listed |
| Zero-shot Detection | Not listed | Supported |
Both support 2 more features | ||
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks | ||
| Overall | 64.8%* | Not evaluated |
| Quantizationsself-hosted | ||
| Avg cost / sample | $0.0012 | – |
| Avg speed / sample | 27.10s | – |
| By task | ||
| Object Detection | 57.0% ±1.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 56.1 to 58.7 | – |
| Counting | 65.3% ±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 62.2 to 67.6 | – |
| Identification | 82.3% ±6.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 75.0 to 87.5 | – |
| OCR | – | – |
| by category | ||
| Reasoning | 54.8% ±1.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 53.0 to 55.6 | – |
Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs SAM 3: Overview
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multimodal language model developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba Group. It carries 35 billion total parameters but activates only approximately 3 billion per forward pass via a learned routing mechanism, giving it the representational capacity of a large dense model at a fraction of the inference compute. The model is natively multimodal, processing images, documents, and video alongside text as a core architectural capability rather than an add-on. It supports a native context window of 262,144 tokens, extensible up to 1,010,000 tokens via YaRN. A key design feature is the unified thinking/non-thinking mode framework: users can switch between deliberate chain-of-thought reasoning and fast direct responses within a single model, and a "thinking preservation" option retains reasoning context across multi-turn agentic workflows to reduce redundant computation.
The model is specifically optimized for agentic coding tasks, including repository-level reasoning, frontend workflow generation, multi-step tool use, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. For vision-language tasks it achieves 92.0 on RefCOCO, 89.9 on OmniDocBench 1.5, and 83.7 on VideoMMMU. The model also supports Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) for speculative decoding. All Qwen3.6 open-weight models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.
Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.
Frequently Asked Questions
Qwen3.6 35B A3B is released under Apache 2.0, while SAM 3 uses Custom. In practice: Qwen3.6 35B A3B: free for commercial use. Licensing often matters more than raw accuracy for commercial deployments, so check the terms against how you plan to ship.
Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for object detection in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.