Falcon 2 VLM vs LLaVA

Falcon 2 11B VLM vs LLaVA: Same Recipe, Different Backbone

Falcon 2 11B VLM is a LLaVA-NeXT model: its published architecture is LlavaNextForConditionalGeneration. Understanding that tells you what tooling works and what you are really comparing.

Back to the overview

The shared recipe

LLaVA-style models bolt a pretrained vision encoder onto a language model and train a projection between them. Falcon 2 11B VLM follows that pattern: a CLIP ViT-L/14 vision tower, a 768-dimensional projection, and the Falcon 2 11B decoder, trained together on image-text data.

Where it differs from public LLaVA checkpoints

  • Backbone: Falcon 2 11B rather than a Llama or Mistral model.
  • Vision tower: CLIP ViT-L/14 at 336 pixels, with dynamic tiling pinpoints up to 1008 pixels.
  • Language coverage: English only, where LLaVA builds vary by base model.
  • Licence: the TII Falcon License 2.0 rather than the base model licence of a given LLaVA build.

What transfers from LLaVA tooling

Because the architecture is standard, the generic LLaVA-NeXT code path in transformers loads it: LlavaNextForConditionalGeneration with LlavaNextProcessor. The prompt format, though, is Falcon-specific: User:<image> plus the instruction, then Falcon: to open the reply.

Related pages

Falcon 2 11B VLMVLM use casesRun the VLM locally

Sources

falcon2.lol is an independent third-party site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or operated by the Technology Innovation Institute, and it does not speak for TII. Every number on this page is attributed to the source listed above.

Falcon 2 11B VLM vs LLaVA: Same Recipe, Different Backbone