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Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B

Gemma 4 26B A4B Overview

Gemma 4 26B A4B is the Mixture-of-Experts variant in Google's Gemma 4 family, with 25.2B total parameters but only 3.8B active per token. Built from the same Gemini 3 research as the 31B dense sibling and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license, it supports a 256K token context window with text and image input and configurable thinking mode. The "A4B" in the name refers to its approximately 4B active parameters. The MoE design makes it significantly faster at inference than the dense 31B, running nearly as fast as a 4B-parameter model while delivering roughly 97% of the dense model's quality.

For vision tasks, the 26B A4B shares the same multimodal capabilities as the 31B image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and structured bounding box output for UI element detection. The tradeoff versus the 31B dense model is a small quality reduction in exchange for much faster inference and lower hardware requirements, fitting in 18GB of VRAM at 4-bit quantization. It ranked #6 among open models on the Arena AI text leaderboard at launch.

Gemma 4 26B A4B Interactive Demo

Model settings

Thinking level

Max output tokens

Default 16,384 · max 16,384

Sign in to adjust thinking and output length per run.

Results appear here. Add an image or pick an example to run Gemma 4 26B A4B.

Gemma 4 26B A4B Details & Performance

Details

Resources

—

Vision Tasks

CaptioningChart Question AnsweringClassificationDocument Question AnsweringImage TaggingMulti-Label ClassificationOCRObject DetectionVision LanguageVisual Question Answering

Features

Foundation VisionLLMs with Vision CapabilitiesMultimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Gemma 4 26B A4B Vision Evals

Vision Evals is Roboflow's ground-truth benchmark: every model runs the same real-world samples across six vision tasks, and answers are scored against ground truth.

Evals updated October 7, 2026Pricing updated October 8, 2026

Overall score#48 of 60
63.6%
Avg cost / sample#26 of 60
$0.0009
Avg speed / sample#51 of 60
27.84s
Avg tokens / sample
3.2K

Strengths and weaknesses

Gemma 4 26B A4B averages 63.6% across the six Vision Evals tasks, ranking #48 of 60 models overall.

Its weakest relative showing is Counting, ranking #53 of 60 at 43.2%.

At $0.0009 per sample it is the 26th cheapest of the 60 benchmarked models, and its average inference time of 27.8s per sample makes it the 51st fastest.

Performance profile

Field medianGemma 4 26B A4B

Field medians: Object Detection 53.6%, Counting 62.2%, Identification 84.4%, OCR 89.3%, Data Extraction 84.5%, Reasoning 57.3%.

Results by task

TaskScoreField (0 to 100)RankCost / sampleSpeed
Object Detection
44.2%
±0.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 43.5 to 44.8
#37 of 60$0.001133.16s
Counting
43.2%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 41.9 to 46.0
#53 of 60$0.000413.72s
Identification
81.3%
±3.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.1 to 84.4
#42 of 60$0.000513.59s
OCR
88.7%
±1.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 87.6 to 90.2
#34 of 60$0.002064.46s
Data Extraction
76.6%
±0.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 76.3 to 77.3
#52 of 60$0.00038.41s
Reasoning
47.7%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 45.0 to 49.0
#38 of 60$0.001032.48s

Price vs. performance

Score vs. cost

Overall benchmark score against estimated cost per sample, on a log scale. Upper-left is the sweet spot: high quality at low cost.

59 models on the current benchmark · scores and efficiency pooled across all six tasks at low effort · Gemma 4 26B-A4B highlighted

Gemma 4 26B A4B scores are the mean of 3 runs per task at low effort; this model has no separate high-effort tier because its chat template only switches thinking on or off · Methodology

View all Vision Evals →

Self-hosted benchmarks

3 quantizations of Gemma 4 26B-A4B, served with vLLM from the published weights and scored on the same tasks as the hosted models. Expand a row for the GPUs it was measured on.

QuantizationWeightsOverall scoreDetection mAP50Single-stream tok/s
FP8Ranked
28.6 GB
63.6%
44.2%194.9
51.6 GB
61.9%
44.0%183.4
17.2 GB
61.6%
42.7%238.1

Rows are ordered by overall score. Every score is the mean of three runs per task under the benchmark protocol (a row marked single run has one), and the gap between quantizations is usually inside the run-to-run range, so read the order as a guide rather than a verdict. Self-hosted rows run with thinking on, the same setting as the hosted frontier models; some hosted open-weight rows still run without thinking, so a self-hosted quant can score above its own hosted API. Quantization still costs a little precision.

Gemma 4 26B A4B Pricing

Gemma 4 26B A4B costs $0.090 per 1M input tokens and $0.300 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.090 / 1M tokens
Output$0.300 / 1M tokens
Cached input$0.050 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Oct 8, 2026

Alternatives to Gemma 4 26B A4B

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

Google
Gemma 4 31B
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
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. On SWE-bench Verified it scores 73.4%, on Terminal-Bench 2.0 it scores 51.5%, and on MCPMark it scores 37.0%. 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.
Qwen
Qwen3.6 27B
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).
Google
Gemini 3.5 Flash
Gemini 3.5 Flash is a multimodal language model developed by Google DeepMind and released at Google I/O 2026. It is built on the Gemini 3 Flash reasoning foundation and introduces configurable thinking levels (minimal, low, medium, and high) that allow developers to tune the depth of internal reasoning before a response is generated. The model accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs and produces text output, with a 1 million token context window and up to 65,000 output tokens per request. It is natively multimodal, processing visual inputs alongside text to support tasks such as image captioning, classification, optical character recognition, object detection, and visual grounding, where the model references specific regions within an image or video frame.Its vision capabilities extend to interpreting UI screenshots, diagrams, charts, and real-world scenes, as well as understanding video and live frame sequences for activity and scene recognition. The model supports combined tool use, including Google Search, URL context, code execution, and custom functions, within a single request, and it uses reasoning context from previous turns when thought signatures are present in the conversation history, enabling persistent multi-turn reasoning chains. Gemini 3.5 Flash carries a knowledge cutoff of January 2026 and is available via the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Google Antigravity, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
Mistral
Mistral Small 3.1 24B
Mistral Small 3.1 24B, released on March 17, 2025, is an open-weight multimodal model from Mistral AI, distributed under the Apache-2.0 license. With around 24B parameters and a 128K token context window, it is available in both base and instruction-tuned (“Instruct”) variants. The model introduces vision support alongside text, enabling tasks like multimodal reasoning, captioning, and image-based Q&A.It is multilingual, supporting many languages, and is optimized for fast responses, function calling, structured dialogue, and long-context reasoning. Despite its size, the model can be run locally in quantized formats, fitting on machines with ~32GB RAM, making it accessible to developers outside large cloud setups. However, the output length is smaller than the 128K input window, meaning long generations may require chaining. In addition, using full vision features or the maximum context window significantly increases compute costs, and performance on highly complex reasoning or enterprise-scale tasks still trails larger proprietary frontier models.

Deploy Gemma 4 26B A4B with an API

Gemma 4 26B A4B runs as a hosted REST endpoint through Roboflow Workflows. Pick a task, then hand the prompt to your coding agent or copy the code. Deploying the workflow into a free Roboflow workspace replaces the your-workspace and YOUR_API_KEY placeholders with your own.

Connect your agent to Roboflow (once)

Add the Roboflow MCP server

claude mcp add --transport http roboflow https://mcp.roboflow.com/mcp

Run /mcp and authorize Roboflow in your browser when the OAuth flow opens.

Start a new Claude Code session so the MCP loads, then paste the prompt below (it works the same in any agent).

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

Integrate the Roboflow "Gemma 4 26B A4B" workflow into my app.

- Endpoint: POST https://serverless.roboflow.com/<your-workspace>/workflows/gemma-4-26b-a4b-captioning
- Auth: send my Roboflow API key as `api_key` in the request body, read from the ROBOFLOW_API_KEY env var (never hardcode).
- Body: { "api_key": ..., "inputs": { `image`: { type: "url" | "base64", value } } }.
- Billing: this workflow needs no provider API key — inference runs on my Roboflow credits. A BYO provider key can be added to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor later.

With the Roboflow MCP connected, call `workflows_get` on "gemma-4-26b-a4b-captioning" to read the exact input schema (the source of truth), then `workflows_run` on a sample image to confirm the output shape before writing code (the MCP is authenticated, so this needs no key). Without the MCP, use the contract above.

Before running the app, set up these keys so it does not error at runtime:
- `ROBOFLOW_API_KEY` (sent as `api_key`) from https://app.roboflow.com/settings/api
Create a .gitignore'd .env with these variables, using placeholder values for any I haven't given you. Then pause and tell me directly, in your reply: the full path to the .env file, exactly which keys I need to paste in, and the link to get each one. Wait for me to confirm I've added them before you run anything. Do not run the app until I confirm.

Then add the integration to my codebase: match my project's language, framework, and conventions; read every key from environment variables (never hardcode); add basic error handling; and include a small runnable example. If you can't tell what language my project uses, ask me.
Installpip install inference-sdk

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
# 1. Import the library
from inference_sdk import InferenceHTTPClient

# 2. Connect to your workflow
client = InferenceHTTPClient(
  api_url="https://serverless.roboflow.com",
  api_key="YOUR_API_KEY"
)

# 3. Run your workflow on an image
result = client.run_workflow(
  workspace_name="your-workspace",
  workflow_id="gemma-4-26b-a4b-captioning",
  images={
    "image": "YOUR_IMAGE.jpg"  # Path to your image file
  },
  use_cache=True  # cache workflow definition for 15 minutes
)

# 4. Get your results
print(result)

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

// Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
const response = await fetch('https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/gemma-4-26b-a4b-captioning', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    api_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY',
    inputs: {
      "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"}
    }
  })
});

const result = await response.json();
console.log(result);

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
curl --location 'https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/gemma-4-26b-a4b-captioning' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
  "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "inputs": {
    "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"}
  }
}'

Gemma 4 26B A4B License

Apache-2.0 · Permissive license

Gemma 4 26B A4B is released under Apache-2.0, a permissive license. The Gemma 4 26B A4B license lets you run, fine-tune, and redistribute the model in commercial products with no obligation to open-source related code changes, so no separate commercial license is required.

Commercial use
Permitted. Because Apache-2.0 is permissive, Gemma 4 26B A4B can ship inside paid products and internal systems with no commercial license and no revenue threshold.
Modification
Permitted. Fine-tuning, quantizing, and distilling are all allowed, and your code changes can stay closed. Files you change must be marked as changed.
Redistribution
Permitted with attribution. Ship the Apache-2.0 license text and any NOTICE file alongside the weights or derived code.

Apache-2.0 grants an express patent license that terminates if you bring a patent claim over the work, and it disclaims warranties. Validate Gemma 4 26B A4B on your own data before you depend on it in production.

Read the full Apache 2.0 license ↗

Do I need a commercial license for Gemma 4 26B A4B?

This is the straightforward case: a permissive license is the best technical solution and you are free to deploy Gemma 4 26B A4B commercially without open-sourcing your own code.

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.

Talk to sales

This model is released under the Apache License 2.0, a permissive open-source license that allows commercial use, modification, distribution, and patent use.

Yes. Under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license, you can freely use this model for commercial purposes, including in proprietary products. You must retain the copyright notice and disclaimers when redistributing.

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

Frequently Asked Questions About Gemma 4 26B A4B Vision

Yes. Gemma 4 26B A4B accepts image input and handles OCR, data extraction, object counting, identification, visual reasoning, and object detection. On Roboflow's Vision Evals its strongest task is OCR at 88.7% (#34 of 60 at low effort). You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

Yes. its transcriptions match the ground truth 88.7% on average (#34 of 60 at low effort) on Vision Evals OCR. Pulling specific fields out of documents (data extraction) scores 76.6%.

Not its strength. On Vision Evals, Gemma 4 26B A4B scores 44.2% mAP@50 on object detection (#37 of 60 at low effort) and 43.2% judge-graded accuracy on object counting. For production counting or precise localization, pairing it with a specialized detector like RF-DETR or your own trained model in a Roboflow Workflow is usually more reliable: detect the objects, then count the detections.

On our benchmark's task mix, Gemma 4 26B A4B averages $0.0009 per sample at $0.09 per 1M input and $0.30 per 1M output tokens (#26 of 60 on cost), with an average speed of 27.8s per sample across the benchmark. Actual cost depends on your images and prompts.

On the overall Vision Evals ranking, Gemma 4 26B A4B sits #48 of 60 at 63.6%, just behind Qwen3.8 Flash Next (64%) and just ahead of Kimi K2.6 (62.9%). See the full side-by-side: Gemma 4 26B A4B vs Qwen3.8 Flash Next.