Roboflow
Qwen

Qwen: Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct Overview

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct is a flagship multimodal vision-language model developed by Qwen (Alibaba Cloud), designed for instruction-following tasks that combine advanced text generation with visual understanding. It serves as a high-end open-weight model for developers and researchers building multimodal AI systems that require strong reasoning, perception, and long-context capabilities.

The model supports interleaved text and image inputs, very long context windows (up to roughly 256K tokens), and efficient inference through a mixture-of-experts architecture with about 22B active parameters out of 235B total. In today’s landscape, it competes with top-tier proprietary vision-language models while offering the advantages of open weights and flexible deployment. Typical applications include multimodal assistants, document and image analysis, visual reasoning, and large-context instruction-based workflows.

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct Interactive Demo

Model settings

Thinking level

Max output tokens

Default 32,768 · max 32,768

Sign in to adjust thinking and output length per run.

Results appear here. Add an image or pick an example to run Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct.

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct 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

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct Vision Evals

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

Evals updated October 13, 2026Pricing updated October 19, 2026

Overall score#48 of 63
55.2%
Avg cost / sample#15 of 63
$0.0011
Avg speed / sample#43 of 63
15.87s
Avg tokens / sample
2.5K

Strengths and weaknesses

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct averages 55.2% across the five Vision Evals tasks, ranking #48 of 63 models overall.

Its weakest relative showing is Reasoning, ranking #60 of 63 at 29.8%.

At $0.0011 per sample it is the 15th cheapest of the 63 benchmarked models, and its average inference time of 15.9s per sample makes it the 43rd fastest.

Performance profile

Field medianQwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct

Field medians: Object Detection 54.4%, Counting 63.5%, Identification 84.4%, OCR 63.6%, Reasoning 57.6%.

Results by task

TaskScoreField (0 to 100)RankCost / sampleSpeed
Object Detection
52.1%
#35 of 63$0.001418.26s
Counting
47.3%
#52 of 63$0.00023.92s
Identification
90.6%
#17 of 63$0.00023.23s
OCR (low)
56.4%
#36 of 47$0.001320.59s
Single value
48.3%
Transcription
84.3%
Structured JSON
71.0%
Text localization
24.0%
OCR (high)
55.5%
#41 of 47$0.001321.86s
Single value
46.5%
Transcription
84.1%
Structured JSON
71.4%
Text localization
21.6%
Reasoning (low)
29.8%
#60 of 63$0.00021.69s
Reasoning (high)
33.8%
#50 of 50$0.00021.96s
  • Thinking longer does not help: 0.9 points lower on ocr at high effort for 1x the cost and 1.1x the latency.
  • Thinking longer helps: 4 points higher on reasoning at high effort for 1x the cost and 1.2x the latency.

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.

62 models on the current benchmark · scores and efficiency pooled across all five tasks at low effort · Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct highlighted

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct scores are from a single run per task; a three-run re-run under the current protocol is pending · Methodology

View all Vision Evals →

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct Pricing

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct costs $0.210 per 1M input tokens and $1.90 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.210 / 1M tokens
Output$1.90 / 1M tokens
Cached input$0.100 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Oct 19, 2026

Alternatives to Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

Qwen
Qwen3.5 397B A17B
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397B-parameter (17B active) open-weight multimodal model developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team, released on 2026-02-16 under Apache-2.0. It supports text and image inputs with text outputs, combining a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture with Gated Delta Networks for efficient scaling. The model provides native vision-language reasoning and a large ~262K token context window, extendable to ~1M tokens.As the first open-weight release in the Qwen3.5 family, it positions itself as a high-capacity, long-context alternative in the large vision-language space, balancing scale and efficiency via sparse activation. It is designed for advanced reasoning, coding, agent workflows, and multimodal understanding tasks.
Qwen
Qwen3.5 122B A10B
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B is a high-capacity multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team as part of the Qwen3.5 model family. The architecture contains 122 billion total parameters while activating roughly 10 billion per token through sparse expert routing, allowing the model to balance large-scale reasoning ability with relatively efficient inference compared to dense models of similar size.The model is designed to process both text and visual inputs within a unified multimodal framework, enabling tasks that require reasoning across images, documents, charts, and natural language. This makes it suitable for applications such as document understanding, diagram interpretation, and complex visual question answering.Qwen3.5-122B-A10B supports a native context window of approximately 256,000 tokens, which can be extended further through techniques such as YaRN scaling to support very long-context workloads. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, it builds on earlier Qwen multimodal systems and provides developers with an open-weight model capable of handling demanding multimodal reasoning and analysis tasks.
Meta
Llama 4 Maverick
Llama 4 Maverick, introduced on April 5, 2025, is one of the first models in Meta’s Llama 4 family, designed as a natively multimodal model supporting text + image inputs with text outputs. It employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 128 experts, activating ~17B parameters per token out of a pool of ~400B total parameters. This design improves scalability, efficiency, and reasoning capacity. Maverick has a 1M-token context window, enabling it to handle large documents, extended conversations, and multimodal reasoning. Its knowledge cutoff is August 2024.The model is released under the Llama 4 Community License and comes in both base and instruction-tuned (“Instruct”) versions. Maverick is widely deployed via Hugging Face, Google Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock, and Oracle Cloud, making it one of the most accessible large open-weight models. However, it outputs text only (no image/audio generation) and, while input capacity is huge, output limits are typically much smaller. The MoE design also raises hardware demands, as maintaining 128 experts requires significant compute resources, and Meta’s license introduces restrictions around commercial-scale use.
Google
Gemini 3.1 Pro
Gemini 3.1 Pro is a proprietary multimodal model from Google’s Gemini 3 series, released in early 2026 and designed for advanced reasoning across large multimodal datasets. It accepts text, images, audio, video, and documents, supporting up to a 1-million-token input context with up to 64k output tokens. Compared with Gemini 3 Pro, it improves long-context synthesis and multi-step reasoning, enabling more reliable analysis of large documents, datasets, and software codebases.The model also advances visual understanding and grounding, allowing it to interpret UI screenshots, diagrams, and real-world scenes while referencing specific regions within images or video. These capabilities make Gemini 3.1 Pro well suited for multimodal workflows involving document processing, interface analysis, robotics research, and complex visual reasoning.
Anthropic
Claude Opus 4.7
Claude Opus 4.7 is a proprietary multimodal language model developed by Anthropic, released on April 16, 2026. It is designed for agentic coding, long-horizon task execution, and enterprise knowledge work. The model supports text and vision inputs and operates with a context window of up to 1,000,000 tokens. It introduces adaptive thinking, which dynamically allocates reasoning based on task complexity, along with configurable effort controls including a new xhigh setting that sits between the existing high and max levels. It achieves 87.6% on SWE-bench Verified and 78.0% on OSWorld-Verified, reflecting strong performance on autonomous software engineering and computer use tasks respectively.Compared to Claude Opus 4.6, version 4.7 shows improved instruction following and higher reliability in extended agentic tasks. Vision capabilities now support high-resolution inputs up to 2,576px on the long edge (~3.75 megapixels), more than three times the resolution of prior Claude models, enabling finer interpretation of dense diagrams, UI screenshots, and document layouts. These improvements, combined with self-verification on long-running tasks and a new task budget system for controlling agentic loops, make it well-suited for complex software engineering, technical analysis, and multimodal vision workflows.
OpenAI
GPT-6 Sol
GPT-6 Sol is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from OpenAI, released on September 22, 2026 alongside GPT-6 Luna as an efficiency-oriented tier of the GPT-6 family that began with GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI states that Sol and Luna are trained with methods similar to those used for Astra, carrying the same work on professional tasks, factuality, coding, computer use, and alignment into models that run faster. Sol accepts text and image input and returns text output, and OpenAI documents a context window of roughly one million tokens together with a knowledge cutoff of April 20, 2026.The model targets complex coding and agentic workflows and exposes a configurable reasoning effort setting with levels of none, low, medium, high, xhigh, and max, which trades latency and token consumption against answer quality. OpenAI reports results including 33.2% on AutomationBench at xhigh effort and 56.4% on Agents' Last Exam at max effort, while its reported DeepSWE and OSWorld 2.0 figures of 68.8% and 64.4% fall below those of the earlier GPT-5.6 Sol. Its vision behavior covers image understanding tasks such as visual question answering, captioning, document and chart interpretation, and text recognition.

Deploy Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct with an API

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct 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 "Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct" workflow into my app.

- Endpoint: POST https://serverless.roboflow.com/<your-workspace>/workflows/qwen3-vl-235b-a22b-instruct-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 "qwen3-vl-235b-a22b-instruct-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="qwen3-vl-235b-a22b-instruct-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/qwen3-vl-235b-a22b-instruct-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/qwen3-vl-235b-a22b-instruct-captioning' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
  "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "inputs": {
    "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"}
  }
}'

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct License

Apache-2.0 · Permissive license

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct is released under the Apache 2.0 license, so it's commercially usable out of the box: you can ship it in closed-source, commercial products, including self-hosted deployments, without paying a license fee or open-sourcing your code. The Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct license is permissive, so no separate commercial license is required.

Commercial use
Permitted. Because Apache-2.0 is permissive, Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct 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 Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct 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 Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct?

This is the straightforward case: a permissive license is the best technical solution and you are free to deploy Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct 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 Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct Vision

Yes. Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct accepts image input and handles OCR, object counting, identification, visual reasoning, and object detection. On Roboflow's Vision Evals its strongest task is Identification at 90.6% (#17 of 63 at low effort). You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

Yes. it scores 56.4% (#36 of 47 at low effort) on Vision Evals OCR, which covers single readings, full transcriptions, structured JSON, and locating text with boxes. Within that, full transcriptions score 84.3%, and returning the fields of a label or form as JSON scores 71%.

Not its strength. On Vision Evals, Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct scores 52.1% mAP@50 on object detection (#35 of 63 at low effort) and 47.3% 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, Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct averages $0.0011 per sample at $0.21 per 1M input and $1.90 per 1M output tokens (#15 of 63 on cost), with an average speed of 15.9s per sample across the benchmark. Actual cost depends on your images and prompts.

On the overall Vision Evals ranking, Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct sits #48 of 63 at 55.2%, just behind Claude Sonnet 5 (55.3%) and just ahead of GLM 5V Turbo (54.6%). See the full side-by-side: Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct vs Claude Sonnet 5.