Kimi-VL

Introduction

We present Kimi-VL, an efficient open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) vision-language model (VLM) that offers advanced multimodal reasoning, long-context understanding, and strong agent capabilities—all while activating only 2.8B parameters in its language decoder (Kimi-VL-A3B).

Kimi-VL demonstrates strong performance across challenging domains: as a general-purpose VLM, Kimi-VL excels in multi-turn agent interaction tasks (e.g.,OSWorld), achieving state-of-the-art results comparable to flagship models. Furthermore, it exhibits remarkable capabilities across diverse challenging vision language tasks, including college-level image and video comprehension, optical character recognition (OCR), mathematical reasoning, multi-image understanding, and etc.

In comparative evaluations, it effectively competes with cutting-edge efficient VLMs such as GPT-4o-mini, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, and Gemma-3-12B-IT, while surpassing GPT-4o in several specialized domains.

Kimi-VL also advances the pareto frontiers of multimodal models in processing long contexts and perceiving clearly: Equipped with a 128K extended context window, Kimi-VL can processes long and diverse inputs, achieving impressive scores of 64.5 on LongVideoBench, and 35.1 on MMLongBench-Doc; Its native-resolution vision encoder, MoonViT, further allows it to see and understand ultra-high-resolution visual inputs, achieving 83.2 on InfoVQA and 34.5 on ScreenSpot-Pro, while maintaining lower computational cost with common visual inputs and general tasks.

Building on this foundation, we introduce an advanced long-thinking variant: Kimi-VL-Thinking. Developed through long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), this model exhibits strong long-horizon reasoning capabilities. It achieves scores of 61.7 on MMMU, 36.8 on MathVision, and 71.3 on MathVista while maintaining the compact 2.8B activated LLM parameter footprint, setting a new standard for efficient yet capable multimodal thinking models.

Architecture

The model adopts an MoE language model, a native-resolution visual encoder (MoonViT), and an MLP projector, as illustrated in the following image.

Model Variants

🤗 For general multimodal perception and understanding, OCR, long video and long document, video perception, and agent uses, we recommend Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct for efficient inference; for advanced text and multimodal reasoning (e.g. math), please consider using Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking.

[!Note] Recommended parameter settings:

• For Thinking models, it is recommended to use Temperature = 0.8.
• For Instruct models, it is recommended to use Temperature = 0.2.
• Greedy sampling (Temperature = 0.0) is okay for non-thinking (instruct) models (aligned with our evaluation setting).

Performance

As an efficient model, Kimi-VL can robustly handle diverse tasks (fine-grained perception, math, college-level problems, OCR, agent, etc) across a broad spectrum of input forms (single-image, multi-image, video, long-document, etc).

A brief comparison with existing 10B-level dense VLMs and DeepSeek-VL2 (A4.5B):

Full comparison (GPT-4o included for reference):