Build specialized multimodal models with LFM3

Liquid Foundation Models (LFM3) is the latest generation of models developed to serve as the foundation for specialized intelligence. These models integrate text, vision, audio, omni, and decision capabilities onto a shared backbone, all within a 2B parameter range. This allows users to select the appropriate model based on their modality, fine-tune it using their own data on a single GPU, and deploy it wherever their application is running.

There are four main changes compared to the previous LFM2 family. For LFM3, Liquid used their hardware-in-the-loop architecture search to redesign the architecture specifically for agentic use cases, which require more capability per parameter and fast inference over long contexts. Unlike its predecessor, LFM3-1.7B-Base comes in 14 device and backend combinations, ranging from phones and Raspberry Pi 5 to laptops, cloud CPUs, GPUs, and Qualcomm Hexagon NPU.

With 24 layers, LFM3-1.7B-Base achieves comparable performance to LFM2-1.2B on short prompts across edge devices. However, when given 8K tokens in context, it is about 25% faster.

Each of the LFM3 models branches from LFM3-1.7B-Base. Rather than running a single large general-purpose model, users can choose the one that fits their inputs, customize it, and run it on-device. The vision and audio models also receive two new in-house encoders, which are integrated into transformer-based architectures.

LFM3-1.7B is ideal for local agents, tool calling, structured outputs, or domain-specific fine-tuning. It has been post-trained to run in agentic harnesses such as Hermes Agent, Pi, and OpenClaw, outperforming its predecessor, LFM2.5-2.6B, with 35% fewer parameters. LFM3-VL-2B is the first LFM vision model to take video as input, performing step-by-step reasoning before providing answers and identifying objects to understand their placement, offering strong potential for robotics.

Despite having fewer parameters (1.9B against 3.1B), LFM3-VL-2B improves the average across 62 vision benchmarks by 13.8 points, bringing it to par with Gemma 4 12B, a model significantly larger than itself.