Is Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct or Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct smaller?

Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.92 GiB against 2.33 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 5.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct is the smaller download — 986,046,944 bytes against 2,497,281,568. At long context the gap widens: Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 5.1× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct	Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
Parameters	2.2B	4.4B
Architecture	qwen2vl	qwen3vl
Layers	28	36
Native context	32,768	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	25	26
Smallest quantization	0.56 GiB	1.01 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.92 GiB	2.33 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct	Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.11 GiB	0.56 GiB	5.14×
8,192	0.22 GiB	1.13 GiB	5.14×
16,384	0.44 GiB	2.25 GiB	5.14×
32,768	0.88 GiB	4.50 GiB	5.14×
65,536	1.75 GiB	9.00 GiB	5.14×
131,072	3.50 GiB	18.00 GiB	5.14×