Model reference · open weights

Qwen3-VL-Embedding

Embeddings Qwen Embeddings 2 builds Open weights 1.4M dl/mo

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.

  • Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B is a 2.1B parameter multimodal embedding model developed by Qwen for sentence-similarity tasks.
  • It generates high-dimensional vectors from text, images, screenshots, and videos to support information retrieval and clustering.
  • The model supports over 30 languages, has a 32k context length, and is released under the Apache-2.0 license.

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 byQwen
Released2026-01-07
Parameters2.1B
VRAM16.3 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B (BF16)

16.3 GBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GB … RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBdoes not fit
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B ↗ 2.1BBF16 4.3 GBRTX 3060 12 GB
Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B (above) ↗ 8.1BBF16 16.3 GBRTX 4090 24 GB

From the model card

What Qwen says about Qwen3-VL-Embedding

Read the model card

Highlights

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.

Model Overview

Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B has the following features:

  • Model Type: MultiModal Embedding
  • Supported Languages: 30+ Languages
  • Supported Input Modalities: Text, images, screenshots, videos, and arbitrary multimodal combinations (e.g., text + image, text + video)
  • Number of Parameters: 2B
  • Context Length: 32k
  • Embedding Dimension: Up to 2048, supports user-defined output dimensions ranging from 64 to 2048

For more details, including benchmark evaluation, hardware requirements, and inference performance, please refer to our technical report, blog, GitHub.

Qwen3-VL-Embedding and Qwen3-VL-Reranker Model list

ModelSizeModel LayersSequence LengthEmbedding DimensionQuantization SupportMRL SupportInstruction Aware
Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B2B2832K2048YesYesYes
Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B8B3632K4096YesYesYes
Qwen3-VL-Reranker-2B2B2832K---Yes
Qwen3-VL-Reranker-8B8B3632K---Yes

Note:

  • Quantization Support indicates the supported quantization post process for the output embedding.
  • MRL Support indicates whether the embedding model supports custom dimensions for the final embedding.
  • Instruction Aware notes 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.

Model Performance

Evaluation Results on MMEB-V2

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.

ModelModel SizeImage CLSImage QAImage RETImage GDImage OverallVideo CLSVideo QAVideo RETVideo MRETVideo OverallVisDoc VDRv1VisDoc VDRv2VisDoc VRVisDoc OODVisDoc OverallAll
# of Datasets →101012436555318104642478
VLM2Vec2B58.749.365.072.959.733.430.520.630.728.649.813.551.848.244.047.7
VLM2Vec-V22B62.956.369.577.364.939.334.328.836.834.675.544.979.462.269.259.2
GME-2B2B54.429.966.955.

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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