Is Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct or Qwen3-1.7B smaller?

Qwen3-1.7B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 1.03 GiB against 1.80 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct vs Qwen3-1.7B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-1.7B is the smaller download — 1,107,409,472 bytes against 1,929,901,056. At long context the gap widens: Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 3.1× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct	Qwen3-1.7B
Parameters	3.8B	2.0B
Architecture	qwen2vl	qwen3
Layers	36	28
Native context	128,000	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	27	48
Smallest quantization	0.77 GiB	0.50 GiB
Q4_K_M	1.80 GiB	1.03 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct	Qwen3-1.7B	Ratio
4,096	0.14 GiB	0.44 GiB	3.11×
8,192	0.28 GiB	0.88 GiB	3.11×
16,384	0.56 GiB	1.75 GiB	3.11×
32,768	1.13 GiB	3.50 GiB	3.11×
65,536	2.25 GiB	7.00 GiB	3.11×
131,072	4.50 GiB	14.00 GiB	3.11×