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Qwen

Qwen: Qwen3.5 9b

Qwen3.5 9b Overview

Qwen3.5-9B is a 9-billion-parameter multimodal foundation model developed by Alibaba Cloud's Qwen team, released on March 2, 2026 as part of the Qwen3.5 model family. Designed for efficient multimodal reasoning and long-context language tasks, it notably outperforms the older Qwen3-30B, a model more than three times its size, on key benchmarks including GPQA Diamond, IFEval, and LongBench.

The model supports vision-language inputs through an early-fusion multimodal architecture built on a dense hybrid foundation of Gated Delta Networks and Gated Attention. It can also operate in a text-only mode by skipping the vision encoder during inference. It provides a 262,144-token context window (extensible to ~1M tokens via YaRN) and is released under the Apache License 2.0. Within the current AI landscape, Qwen3.5-9B offers a strong balance of capability and efficiency, making it well-suited for multimodal assistants, document analysis, long-context reasoning, and developer-deployed agentic systems.

Qwen3.5 9b Interactive Demo

Qwen3.5 9b Details & Performance

Details

Resources

Vision Tasks

Vision LanguageObject DetectionOCRVisual Question AnsweringCaptioning

Features

LLMs with Vision CapabilitiesMultimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Arena Rankings

Qwen3.5 9b Vision Evals

Qwen3.5 9b 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#16 of 7771.64% pass rate · better than 77%
Score71.64%pass rate across 67 tasks
Speed8.99savg response per task
Cost$0.100 in · $0.150 out / 1M
Tokenstokens unavailable
Score key:≥75%40–74%<40%
CategoryPassedScore
Defect Detection13 / 15
86.7%
Spatial Understanding16 / 19
84.2%
Object Understanding10 / 14
71.4%
Document Understanding6 / 9
66.7%
Object Counting3 / 10
30%

Scores based on a single evaluation run · Methodology

View all legacy Vision Evals results →

Qwen3.5 9b Pricing

Qwen3.5 9b costs $0.100 per 1M input tokens and $0.150 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.100 / 1M tokens
Output$0.150 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Jul 20, 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.

10 of 11 models plotted · 1 not yet evaluated

ModelScoreMedian tokensEst. cost / taskCompare
OpenAIGPT-5.6 Sol76.1%1.5K$0.0073Compare
GoogleGemini 3.1 Pro75.8%1.1K$0.0024Compare
GoogleGemini 3 Flash74.6%1.4K$0.0014Compare
OpenAIGPT-5 Mini73.1%1.8K$0.0006Compare
QwenQwen3.5 27B71.6%1.2K$0.0003Compare
QwenQwen3.5 9B(this model)71.6%
AnthropicClaude Sonnet 570.2%2.2K$0.0048Compare
AnthropicClaude Sonnet 4.670.2%2.3K$0.0080Compare
OpenAIGPT-5.6 Luna70.2%1.5K$0.0017Compare
GoogleGemini 2.5 Pro70.2%856$0.0060Compare
GoogleGemini 3.1 Flash-Lite68.7%1.1K$0.0003Compare

Alternatives to Qwen3.5 9b

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

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.
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 2.5 Flash-Lite
Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, released for general availability on July 22, 2025, is the most cost-efficient model in the Gemini 2.5 family, designed for high-volume and latency-sensitive tasks. It is multimodal, supporting text, images, video, audio, and PDFs as inputs, with text as its primary output. The model handles up to 1 million input tokens and generates outputs up to 64K tokens, making it suitable for large-scale document or media processing at low cost. It is built on a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture with native multimodal support, though exact parameter counts are undisclosed.Flash-Lite offers the lowest usage cost among Gemini 2.5 models. It introduces developer controls for “thinking mode,” allowing fine-tuning of reasoning depth vs. efficiency. It also integrates native tools such as code execution, search grounding, and URL context. While strong on translation, classification, coding, and general multimodal reasoning, it lacks support for image or audio generation in its stable release and is less capable than Gemini 2.5 Flash or Pro on complex reasoning-heavy workflows.
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.
Anthropic
Claude Haiku 4.5
Claude Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic’s lightweight model in the Claude 4.5 series, released in October 2025 under a proprietary license. Designed for speed and cost efficiency, it delivers near-frontier performance while maintaining Anthropic’s AI Safety Level 2 standard. Haiku 4.5 supports both text and multimodal (text and image) inputs, integrates tool use and extended reasoning, and features a 200,000 token context window, making it adept at handling long or complex workflows. Though the parameter count remains undisclosed, it achieves about 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified, reflecting strong coding and reasoning ability. Haiku 4.5 is ideal for developers and researchers seeking rapid, cost-effective model calls for analysis, coding, or multimodal understanding.
OpenAI
GPT-5 Nano
GPT-5 Nano, released by OpenAI on August 7, 2025, is the smallest and most cost-efficient model in the GPT-5 family. Like its larger counterparts, it is multimodal—accepting text and images, supporting tool use, structured outputs, and reasoning—but it is optimized for speed, low latency, and affordability. It features input and output token limits of roughly 272K and 128K tokens respectively, enabling large-context processing even at its compact scale. Its knowledge cutoff is around May 2024, slightly earlier than the full GPT-5 model.GPT-5 Nano is well-suited for high-volume or cost-sensitive deployments such as mobile apps, embedded AI systems, or rapid-response APIs. While it offers less depth on complex reasoning and coding tasks compared to GPT-5 Mini or Pro, it retains core multimodal and agentic capabilities, making it an attractive option where efficiency and scale matter more than maximum performance.

Qwen3.5 9b License

Apache 2.0

License terms and commercial-use guidance for Qwen3.5 9b.

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

Read the full Apache 2.0 license ↗

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 Qwen3.5 9b Vision

Yes. Qwen3.5 9b accepts image input, and on Roboflow's previous vision benchmark it passed 71.6% of visual understanding tasks (#16 of 77). You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

Qwen3.5 9b 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 Qwen3.5 9b in the free Roboflow Playground: upload an image and see results in seconds. A free account unlocks unlimited runs.