Model reference · open weights
Qwen3-VL-Embedding is an open-weight embedding model from Qwen. Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B (BF16) weighs 16.3 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 4090 24 GB.
Summary of the Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.
What it is
| Released by | Qwen |
|---|---|
| Released | 2026-01-07 |
| Parameters | 2.1B |
| VRAM | 16.3 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Runs | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB … RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | does not fit | |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
Builds
| Build | Params | Precision | Weights | Smallest setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B ↗ | 2.1B | BF16 | 4.3 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
| Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B (above) ↗ | 8.1B | BF16 | 16.3 GB | RTX 4090 24 GB |
From the model card
The Qwen3-VL-Embedding and Qwen3-VL-Reranker model series are the latest additions to the Qwen family, built upon the recently open-sourced and powerful Qwen3-VL foundation model. Specifically designed for multimodal information retrieval and cross-modal understanding, this suite accepts diverse inputs including text, images, screenshots, and videos, as well as inputs containing a mixture of these modalities.
While the Embedding model generates high-dimensional vectors for broad applications like retrieval and clustering, the Reranker model is engineered to refine these results, establishing a comprehensive pipeline for state-of-the-art multimodal search.
Multimodal Versatility: Both models seamlessly handle a wide range of inputs—including text, images, screenshots, and video—within a unified framework. They deliver state-of-the-art performance across diverse multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval, video-text matching, visual question answering (VQA), and multimodal content clustering.
Unified Representation Learning (Embedding): By leveraging the Qwen3-VL architecture, the Embedding model generates semantically rich vectors that capture both visual and textual information in a shared space. This facilitates efficient similarity computation and retrieval across different modalities.
High-Precision Reranking (Reranker): We also introduce the Qwen3-VL-Reranker series to complement the embedding model. The reranker takes a (query, document) pair as input—where both query and document may contain arbitrary single or mixed modalities—and outputs a precise relevance score. In retrieval pipelines, the two models are typically used in tandem: the embedding model performs efficient initial recall, while the reranker refines results in a subsequent re-ranking stage. This two-stage approach significantly boosts retrieval accuracy.
Exceptional Practicality: Inheriting Qwen3-VL’s multilingual capabilities, the series supports over 30 languages, making it ideal for global applications. It is highly practical for real-world scenarios, offering flexible vector dimensions, customizable instructions for specific use cases, and strong performance even with quantized embeddings. These capabilities enable developers to seamlessly integrate both models into existing pipelines, unlocking powerful cross-lingual and cross-modal understanding.
Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B has the following features:
For more details, including benchmark evaluation, hardware requirements, and inference performance, please refer to our technical report, blog, GitHub.
| Model | Size | Model Layers | Sequence Length | Embedding Dimension | Quantization Support | MRL Support | Instruction Aware |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B | 2B | 28 | 32K | 2048 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B | 8B | 36 | 32K | 4096 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Qwen3-VL-Reranker-2B | 2B | 28 | 32K | - | - | - | Yes |
| Qwen3-VL-Reranker-8B | 8B | 36 | 32K | - | - | - | Yes |
Note:
Quantization Supportindicates the supported quantization post process for the output embedding.MRL Supportindicates whether the embedding model supports custom dimensions for the final embedding.Instruction Awarenotes whether the embedding or reranking model supports customizing the input instruction according to different tasks. Our evaluation indicates that, for most downstream tasks, using instructions (instruct) typically yields an improvement of 1% to 5% compared to not using them. Therefore, we recommend that developers create tailored instructions specific to their tasks and scenarios. In multilingual contexts, we also advise users to write their instructions in English, as most instructions utilized during the model training process were originally written in English.
Results on the MMEB-V2 benchmark. All models except IFM-TTE have been re-evaluated on the updated VisDoc OOD split. CLS: classification, QA: question answering, RET: retrieval, GD: grounding, MRET: moment retrieval, VDR: ViDoRe, VR: VisRAG, OOD: out-of-distribution.
| Model | Model Size | Image CLS | Image QA | Image RET | Image GD | Image Overall | Video CLS | Video QA | Video RET | Video MRET | Video Overall | VisDoc VDRv1 | VisDoc VDRv2 | VisDoc VR | VisDoc OOD | VisDoc Overall | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| # of Datasets → | 10 | 10 | 12 | 4 | 36 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 18 | 10 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 24 | 78 | |
| VLM2Vec | 2B | 58.7 | 49.3 | 65.0 | 72.9 | 59.7 | 33.4 | 30.5 | 20.6 | 30.7 | 28.6 | 49.8 | 13.5 | 51.8 | 48.2 | 44.0 | 47.7 |
| VLM2Vec-V2 | 2B | 62.9 | 56.3 | 69.5 | 77.3 | 64.9 | 39.3 | 34.3 | 28.8 | 36.8 | 34.6 | 75.5 | 44.9 | 79.4 | 62.2 | 69.2 | 59.2 |
| GME-2B | 2B | 54.4 | 29.9 | 66.9 | 55. |
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.