One thing I have been using LFM 2.6 for is annotating emails, text messages, and other metadata. I keep it all ingesting into one giant database and annotate it all as it comes in on an RTX A4500. The LFM annotations are basically triage, and then slowly annotations trickle into my halo model based on lowest confidence (right now that's DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017) for an upgraded annotation. (Agents can then search this database for context).
Excited to roll out LFM 3 to replace it, looks like a big step up. Right now LFM 2.6 gets trustworthy annotations on just over 40% of data points. Just waiting for these to get into LocalAI.
You're doing something similar to what I've been prototyping for the automatic metadata enrichment part. So far I've been using deterministic older techniques + manual for my personal data stream, but I'm trying to learn what the state of the art is for efficiently annotating data with LLMs and newer ML.
This seems interesting, but if anyone else is also doing a similar thing, I'd appreciate tips on how to approach it. So far, I think I have some small RAG model in a demo or the very small qwen models. I think fine tuning seems interesting too. Some of the decision models applied in layers (like a binary search on a pre-generated corpus) could be fast enough to help too?
idk too many options, i'm sure this is a solved problem lol
I can highly recommend gliner2.5, been using it for tagging news articles, fine tuned on my home 5090 in a few minutes on 500 articles tagged by gpt 6.1, works fantastically. Deployed on hetzner running on a cpu .
gliner-style models are absolutely crazy, I learned about them a couple weeks ago when a co-worker fine-tuned an LFM encoder for promptable classification. as far as I know, you don't need to fine-tune; you can just prompt for classification. My co-worker's demo is here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/LiquidAI/prompt-routing
That's very cool. I'm curious if you need a GPU for your use case (email and text triaging). There are some open source alternatives[0] that run/train on CPU, so you can self-host or run locally (and train on your own data for better accuracy), would something like that work for you?
You might also consider the decision models, d1-2B is very strong and good for calibrated classification. Would be happy to share links/resources if you're interested.
First class hardware support makes this really exciting and different. On device processing is cheaper and faster, critical for real time applications of AI. Really excited for the rise of local, smart intelligence!
Did y'all do any particular work that makes these models great for moderation? One of the issues between cloud models vs local is that often people are trying to push the limit of what their hardware can do and it doesn't leave too much headroom for moderation to make the models a little more constrained for kids or schools to use locally, or just for family in general who don't want accidental unhinged results.
In the past I've noticed that some LFM were way better at moderation than much larger models. Not necessarily prejudging what is acceptable, but allowing you to interrogate content with a series of questions to customize the moderation. Other models I tested were far worse.
Decision models are like the next optimization in that direction, but none of the benchmarks for the popular models ever show how good they are at tasks like content moderation. The smaller and more efficient we can get that workload, the more that it can simply be on by default in a lot of use cases without feeling like you're giving up a lot of performance, creative freedom or accuracy. You can't have a high number of false positives or people would rather take control back.
We need local content moderation to be cool, efficient, accurate and configurable so that people can get the higher quality results which unsafe models tend to produce, while filtering out the unsafe results fast enough that it can even be done in an agentic way and fed back into the model to steer its results.
Is interesting how the live mode is restarting the text every 30 sec, wonder how it can impact a thing that may be agreed over several minutes.
Say I would like to get action items out of an hour long recording, am I supposed to go straight from the audio with LFM3-Audio-2B? Or is it transcribe first and give the text to LFM3-1.7B?
What if I want to fine-tune the action items routine. How many labelled examples do you estimate such task may need?
It all depends on your hardware and throughput requirements. Suppose
1. I were building for my work laptop (M4 Max, 36GB RAM)
2. I had a batched use cases (transcribing + making action items for all meetings in a day)
I would use the LFM3-Audio-2B for ASR (audio -> text transcript) and then LFM3-1.7B for extracting particular action items and adding them to my tool of choice (Linear, Jira, Notes app, etc).
If you can fine-tune (100+ labeled samples, and a GPU), you likely can fine-tune LFM3-Audio-2B for audio -> action items in a single step.
Which specific model? and are tools available? I would say that there is lots of RL with tool use, but that the reasoning traces are not always perfect. In general, models think about things that might be wrong, but will recover from this poor line of thinking.
What makes it cool? What should make me go "oh yeah let's go"?
From what I can see by skimming the document, I would assume "something something specialized use-cases", but what does that mean? And what does it mean assuming I have attention deficit?
If you want to do local classification/image processing, I think the d1-2B is amazing, it can run on 1GB of unified RAM.
Now that it's released and I have weekends off again, I'm going to play with the VL-2B model and the d1-2B and see if I can prompt it to control a small Lego robot arm like this https://bricksrl.github.io/ProjectPage/
If you like agents, I think the 1.7B is very strong for its size and can be used to automate small stuff like classifying emails, cleaning your downloads folder, etc.
It can also be fine-tuned for specific use cases with SFT/DPO/GRPO. The blog post talks about fine-tuning for wind-turbine classification. If there's things you want to automate, but GPT-6-Luna is not strong enough, and bigger models are too expensive, you might fine-tune one of the LFM3 models and use it locally for repetitive tasks.
It's a model designed to be tiny and still functional, unlike other larger models that are just scaled down and then run into problems (doom loops, intelligence/reasoning failure, tool call failure). You use it when you want a fine-tuned tiny model processing text/audio/video on multiple platforms. (I don't work for them but this is my takeaway)
Yes! LFM3-VL-2B is a very strong OCR model for its size, especially given how general a model it is. You can also fine-tune it with a specific output format and it will dramatically improve. We have a Google Colab here: https://colab.research.google.com/github/Liquid4All/cookbook...
Surprisingly (or maybe not?), LFM3-VL-2B gave me better results than LFM3-1.7B on text-only prompts (general knowledge, chatting) through liquid playground.
As an example, when asked “what does a cow say?”, LFM3-1.7B said that a cow can say “Oink”, and when I asked the same question to LFM3-VL-3B, it (correctly) said “moo”. I assume this is lower quant problem, though: Q8 versions I’ve played with through llama both give the correct “moo” answer.
Just tried both the Omni model and the text only model, both as mlx versions, in lm studio omlx and rapid mlx, none of them could actually fire the model up, kept saying safetensors cant be read (yes I realize Claude should hear this not this thread).
I think mlx-vlm should support both the Audio and the Omni model: https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-vlm/ and there should be native MLX exports for both here:
I’ve been using 2.6B as my main home assistant model and it’s been good. I switched to Ling 3.0 Tiny since it’s faster with A1B. Really hoping 1.7B is good enough (2.5 version was too dumb for HA) so I can run everything on one machine.
Agreed not, but I think we are also moving towards a place where harnesses have code mode built in and where data swizelling and tool use is something the LLMs have to be competent at. I think that's present enough here!
And to beat Qwen3.5-4B with such a capable model is amazing, on top of so many win/draws against 9b in the more general arena.
I can definitely see there being some roles for local agents that offload shell scripting & doing some scut work. I don't know what speed to expect but like, if someone has a decent NPU or GPU and can just get a bunch of basic systems work done with a small local model that could really speed up a lot of workflows that I see day after day after day.
Excited to roll out LFM 3 to replace it, looks like a big step up. Right now LFM 2.6 gets trustworthy annotations on just over 40% of data points. Just waiting for these to get into LocalAI.
This seems interesting, but if anyone else is also doing a similar thing, I'd appreciate tips on how to approach it. So far, I think I have some small RAG model in a demo or the very small qwen models. I think fine tuning seems interesting too. Some of the decision models applied in layers (like a binary search on a pre-generated corpus) could be fast enough to help too?
idk too many options, i'm sure this is a solved problem lol
0: http://jeffyclassify.com/
Would be a fun experiment.
In the past I've noticed that some LFM were way better at moderation than much larger models. Not necessarily prejudging what is acceptable, but allowing you to interrogate content with a series of questions to customize the moderation. Other models I tested were far worse.
Decision models are like the next optimization in that direction, but none of the benchmarks for the popular models ever show how good they are at tasks like content moderation. The smaller and more efficient we can get that workload, the more that it can simply be on by default in a lot of use cases without feeling like you're giving up a lot of performance, creative freedom or accuracy. You can't have a high number of false positives or people would rather take control back.
We need local content moderation to be cool, efficient, accurate and configurable so that people can get the higher quality results which unsafe models tend to produce, while filtering out the unsafe results fast enough that it can even be done in an agentic way and fed back into the model to steer its results.
1. I were building for my work laptop (M4 Max, 36GB RAM)
2. I had a batched use cases (transcribing + making action items for all meetings in a day)
I would use the LFM3-Audio-2B for ASR (audio -> text transcript) and then LFM3-1.7B for extracting particular action items and adding them to my tool of choice (Linear, Jira, Notes app, etc).
If you can fine-tune (100+ labeled samples, and a GPU), you likely can fine-tune LFM3-Audio-2B for audio -> action items in a single step.
In other words: Should I select the model that matches my desired capability set or just use Omni?
> However, the instructions say I must use available tools when answering questions.
On "What animal lays the biggest egg?" with no system prompt
I assume this is something baked into the model through lots of RL with tool use?
What makes it cool? What should make me go "oh yeah let's go"?
From what I can see by skimming the document, I would assume "something something specialized use-cases", but what does that mean? And what does it mean assuming I have attention deficit?
If you want to do local classification/image processing, I think the d1-2B is amazing, it can run on 1GB of unified RAM.
Now that it's released and I have weekends off again, I'm going to play with the VL-2B model and the d1-2B and see if I can prompt it to control a small Lego robot arm like this https://bricksrl.github.io/ProjectPage/
If you like agents, I think the 1.7B is very strong for its size and can be used to automate small stuff like classifying emails, cleaning your downloads folder, etc.
It can also be fine-tuned for specific use cases with SFT/DPO/GRPO. The blog post talks about fine-tuning for wind-turbine classification. If there's things you want to automate, but GPT-6-Luna is not strong enough, and bigger models are too expensive, you might fine-tune one of the LFM3 models and use it locally for repetitive tasks.
I'm curious if this model would be useful for OCR or at least text documents parsing (PDF, DOCX, etc.), what do you think?
- https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM3-Audio-2B-MLX-8bit
- https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM3-Omni-2B-MLX-8bit
It's mediatek NPU claims to handle ONNX. That plus the 12GB ram makes the wonder if I can get this phone to be a mini-agent.
Liquid has also been very good about keeping speed in mind, and the writeup here makes me expect similar. Really good stuff.
And to beat Qwen3.5-4B with such a capable model is amazing, on top of so many win/draws against 9b in the more general arena.
I can definitely see there being some roles for local agents that offload shell scripting & doing some scut work. I don't know what speed to expect but like, if someone has a decent NPU or GPU and can just get a bunch of basic systems work done with a small local model that could really speed up a lot of workflows that I see day after day after day.