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Google

Google: Gemma 3 4B

Gemma 3 4B Overview

Gemma 3 4B, released on March 12, 2025, is the mid-sized member of Google DeepMind’s open-weight Gemma 3 family. With about 4 billion parameters, it is multimodal—supporting text and image inputs and generating text outputs. Like the larger Gemma 3 models, it features a 128,000-token input context window with an output capacity of ~8,192 tokens, enabling it to handle long documents and mixed text–image reasoning tasks.

The 4B variant is designed as a balance between efficiency and capability: it offers multilingual support across 140+ languages, strong summarization and reasoning performance, and compatibility with moderate hardware. Inference can run with ~6.4 GB VRAM in BF16, or significantly less in quantized 8-bit (~4.4 GB) or 4-bit (~3.4 GB) modes, making it accessible to developers outside large-scale infrastructure. While it lags behind the 12B and 27B versions on the most complex reasoning and multimodal benchmarks, its lower compute footprint makes it ideal for research, prototyping, and practical deployment where efficiency matters.

Gemma 3 4B Interactive Demo

Gemma 3 4B Details & Performance

Details

Resources

Vision Tasks

CaptioningChart Question AnsweringClassificationDocument Question AnsweringImage TaggingMulti-Label ClassificationOCRVision LanguageVisual Question Answering

Features

Foundation VisionLLMs with Vision CapabilitiesMultimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Arena Rankings

Gemma 3 4B Vision Evals

Gemma 3 4B has not yet been evaluated on the current benchmark. The results below are from the legacy version of Vision Evals, our previous benchmark. See the current Vision Evals

Visual Understanding

77 models · 67 tasks
HighestLowest
This model#73 of 7737.31% pass rate · better than 5%
Score37.31%pass rate across 67 tasks
Speed16.80savg response per task
Cost$0.050 in · $0.100 out / 1M
Tokenstokens unavailable
Score key:≥75%40–74%<40%
CategoryPassedScore
Defect Detection9 / 15
60%
Document Understanding5 / 9
55.6%
Object Understanding6 / 14
42.9%
Spatial Understanding5 / 19
26.3%
Object Counting0 / 10
0%
HighestLowest
This model#44 of 5864.19% pass rate · better than 24%
Score64.19%pass rate across 229 tasks
Speed0.92savg response per task
Cost<$0.0001 / task$0.050 in · $0.100 out / 1M
Tokens314 / task300 in · 12 out
Score key:≥75%40–74%<40%
CategoryPassedScore
License Plate Recognition26 / 30
86.7%
Text Recognition22 / 30
73.3%
Focused Scene OCR63 / 99
63.6%
VQA & Extraction35 / 60
58.3%
Handwritten Math1 / 10
10%

Scores based on a single evaluation run · Methodology

View all legacy Vision Evals results →

Gemma 3 4B Pricing

Gemma 3 4B costs $0.050 per 1M input tokens and $0.100 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.050 / 1M tokens
Output$0.100 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Aug 12, 2026

Price vs. performance

Estimated cost per task vs. Visual Understanding score, for this model and others ranked near it. Upper-left is the sweet spot (high quality, low cost). Based on Vision Evals (legacy) results.

6 of 7 models plotted · 1 not yet evaluated

ModelScoreMedian tokensEst. cost / taskCompare
AnthropicClaude Haiku 4.558.2%2.3K$0.0030Compare
OpenAIGPT-5 Nano58.2%2.7K$0.0003Compare
QwenQwen3.5 397B A17B58.2%1.5K$0.0008Compare
GoogleGemini 2.5 Flash55.2%476$0.0005Compare
GoogleGemini 2.5 Flash-Lite53.7%301<$0.0001Compare
GoogleGemma 3 4B(this model)37.3%
MoonshotAIKimi K2.535.8%2.7K$0.0031Compare

Alternatives to Gemma 3 4B

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

Qwen
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct is an open-weight multimodal vision-language model developed by Qwen / Alibaba Cloud as part of the Qwen3-VL series, designed for instruction-following tasks that combine text with visual inputs such as images and video. Released around October 2025 under the Apache-2.0 license, it targets developers who need capable multimodal reasoning without the scale or cost of very large models.The model contains roughly 8.8 billion dense parameters and supports text, image, and video understanding with strong spatial perception, visual reasoning, and emerging visual agent abilities such as GUI interaction. A standout feature is its native ~256K token context window, extendable to around 1M tokens, enabling long-document reading and extended video comprehension. In today’s landscape, it balances openness, long-context capacity, and solid multimodal performance against heavier proprietary models. Typical applications include multimodal assistants, document and video analysis, visual question answering, and research or product prototyping where transparency and deployability matter.
Google
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is a natively multimodal reasoning model developed by Google DeepMind, released on July 21, 2026 as part of the Gemini 3.5 model family. It is the fastest model in the 3.5 series, designed for both low-latency tasks and high-throughput production workloads such as agentic search, document processing, receipt translation, and large-scale data extraction. The model accepts text, images, audio, and video as inputs, with a context window of up to 1 million tokens, and produces text output. It supports configurable thinking levels, allowing developers to tune the balance between response quality, cost, and latency depending on workload requirements.On agentic and coding benchmarks, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite significantly outperforms its predecessor, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, including on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (54% vs. 31%), GDM-MRCR v2 long-context (72.2% vs. 60.1%), and real-world task execution as measured by GDPval-AA v2 (1140 vs. 642). It also surpasses Gemini 3 Flash on SWE-Bench Pro (54.2% vs. 49.6%) and OSWorld-Verified (74.0% vs. 65.1%). According to the Artificial Analysis Index, the model generates output at approximately 350 tokens per second. It is built on the Gemini 3.5 Flash foundation and is evaluated across reasoning, coding, multimodal understanding, multilingual performance, and long-context tasks. The model is developed under Google's Frontier Safety Framework.
Google
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is a natively multimodal reasoning model from Google DeepMind in the Gemini 3 series, based on the Gemini 3 Pro architecture. It processes text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs within a 1 million token context window and produces text output up to 64K tokens. The model targets high-volume, latency-sensitive workloads and supports visual question answering, image and document data extraction, content moderation, classification, translation, automated speech recognition, and agentic data pipelines. It exposes configurable thinking levels of minimal, low, medium, and high, which set the depth of internal reasoning applied per request and let developers balance response quality against cost and latency.On benchmarks reported at launch, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite scores 86.9% on GPQA Diamond and 76.8% on the MMMU Pro multimodal benchmark, and reaches an Elo score of 1432 on the Arena.ai leaderboard. According to Artificial Analysis benchmarks, it produces a 2.5 times faster time to first answer token and a 45% increase in output speed relative to Gemini 2.5 Flash. It also shows improved instruction following, higher audio input quality for automated speech recognition tasks, and support for structured JSON output used in data extraction pipelines.
HuggingFace
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SmolVLM2 is a compact multimodal vision-language model developed by the Hugging Face TB Research team, released in February 2025 under the Apache 2.0 license. It is designed for efficient image and video understanding on resource-constrained hardware, with model variants ranging from 256M to 2.2B parameters. SmolVLM2 processes images, multi-image inputs, and video alongside text queries to generate text outputs for tasks including visual question answering, image captioning, and OCR.SmolVLM2 is designed for on-device and edge deployment, requiring substantially less GPU memory than comparable multimodal models. It supports standard fine-tuning pipelines via the Hugging Face transformers library and quantization through bitsandbytes. SmolVLM2 is suited for applications where a capable vision-language model is needed without full server-scale infrastructure.
Qwen
Qwen2.5 VL 7B Instruct
Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct is a 7-billion parameter vision-language model from Alibaba’s QwenLM team, released on January 26, 2025 under the Apache 2.0 license. It is the instruction-tuned variant of the 7B scale in the Qwen2.5-VL family, designed to process multimodal inputs such as text, images, charts, documents, and video. The model enables structured outputs—including JSON for structured content and bounding boxes for visual localization. Weights are publicly available on Hugging Face and GitHub, making it suitable for both research and applied multimodal use.

Gemma 3 4B License

Custom License · Model-specific license

Gemma 3 4B ships under a custom, model-specific license rather than a standard permissive or restrictive one, so the Gemma 3 4B license has to be read directly. Custom model licenses range from effectively permissive to research-only.

Commercial use
Varies. Custom model licenses commonly restrict commercial use, cap monthly active users, or carve out specific industries — check the Gemma 3 4B terms before you build on it.
Modification
Usually permitted for fine-tuning, but check whether derivative weights inherit the same license and naming requirements.
Redistribution
Often restricted. Look for attribution, naming, and acceptable-use requirements that apply to any copy you share.

Uncertainty around licensing can delay or stop a project, and acceptable-use policies attached to custom licenses are binding terms rather than guidance. Review them alongside the Gemma 3 4B license before production deployment.

Do I need a commercial license for Gemma 3 4B?

If the custom terms rule out your use case, a commercial license from the rights holder is the way through. Roboflow's licensing page lists the supported models whose commercial license is included in a Roboflow plan, so it is worth checking whether Gemma 3 4B — or a permissively licensed alternative — fits your deployment.

Do not hesitate to reach out with questions for your commercial project — our team will help you start solving business problems on the first call. See Roboflow commercial licensing for the models included in each plan.

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This model is released under a custom license that does not match a standard open-source identifier. Read the full license text linked from the model documentation.

Custom licenses vary widely in what they permit. Many model-specific custom licenses include commercial-use restrictions (e.g., non-commercial weights, named-user limits, or jurisdiction restrictions). Read the full license before deploying commercially.

Custom licenses are model-specific. Always check the per-model License Notes section above and the linked official license text.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions About Gemma 3 4B Vision

Yes. Gemma 3 4B accepts image input, and on Roboflow's previous vision benchmark it passed 37.3% of visual understanding tasks (#73 of 77) and scored 64.2% on OCR. You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

Gemma 3 4B has not yet been evaluated on Roboflow's current Vision Evals. The results on this page are from the previous benchmark.

Yes. The demo on this page runs Gemma 3 4B in the free Roboflow Playground: upload an image and see results in seconds. A free account unlocks unlimited runs.