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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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Compare Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs SAM 3 live

Run the same image across every model that supports a task and compare their outputs side-by-side.

Detect and compare bounding boxes across models on the same image.

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QwenQwen3.6 35B A3B
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Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs SAM 3 Comparison Table

Evals updated October 26, 2026Pricing updated November 8, 2026

PropertyQwen3.6 35B A3BSAM 3
OrganizationQwenMeta
Categoryopenopen
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateApr 2026Nov 2025
Context Window262K—
Parameters35B total, 3B activeUnknown
LicenseApache 2.0Custom
Commercial usefree for commercial useSee license terms
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.100No published price
Output $/1M$0.900No published price
Vision Tasks
CaptioningDemoNot listed
Chart Question AnsweringSupportedNot listed
ClassificationDemoNot listed
Document Question AnsweringSupportedNot listed
Image TaggingSupportedNot listed
Instance SegmentationNot listedSupported
Multi-Label ClassificationSupportedNot listed
OCRDemoNot listed
Open Vocabulary Object DetectionNot listedSupported
Phrase GroundingSupportedNot listed
Promptable Concept SegmentationNot listedDemo
Video ClassificationSupportedNot listed
Video Object TrackingNot listedSupported
Vision LanguageSupportedNot listed
Visual Question AnsweringDemoNot listed
Zero Shot SegmentationNot listedSupported
Both support 1 more task
Model Features
LLMs with Vision CapabilitiesSupportedNot listed
Zero-shot DetectionNot listedSupported
Both support 2 more features
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks
Overall
64.8%*
Not evaluated
Quantizationsself-hosted
FP864.8%AWQ-INT460.9%hardware →
Avg cost / sample$0.0012–
Avg speed / sample27.10s–
By task
Object Detection
57.0%
±1.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 56.1 to 58.7
$0
–
Counting
65.3%
±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 62.2 to 67.6
$0
–
Identification
82.3%
±6.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 75.0 to 87.5
$0
–
OCR––
by category
Reasoning
54.8%
±1.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 53.0 to 55.6
$0
–

Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs SAM 3: Overview

Qwen3.6 35B A3B

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.

SAM 3

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.