35M linear projection replaces E4B's 150M 16-layer Vision Encoder. Bidirectional attention in the 48-layer LLM absorbs patch features. Comparison with Fuyu, EVE, EVEv2, and Mono-InternVL.
Tested Gemma 4 MTP drafter on M1 Max 64GB with mlx-vlm 0.5.0. Only the 26B A4B MoE got +13%; 31B Dense and E4B got slower. Code gen vs short haiku prompts flip the result.
Reading Google's MTP drafter docs, vLLM recipes, and the AI for Developers guide. The 3x claim holds for 31B Dense but 26B A4B MoE stalls at batch 1 because speculative decoding verification loads extra expert weights per candidate token.
I tested local Vision LLMs (Gemma 3, Qwen2.5-VL, Llama 3.2 Vision, Gemma 4) to see if they could look at character illustrations and pixel art and generate RPG-style stats in JSON format.
