inference/research
verifiedhigh · 0.90updated 2026-10-03

Gemma 3 12B IT (multimodal)

dense 12.187B

Fields

id
models/gemma-3-12b-it
Family
gemma-3
Vendor
Google DeepMind
Release year
2025
Architecture
dense
Params (B)
12.187
Active params (B)
12.187
Hidden size
3,840
Layers
48
KV heads
8
Head dim
256
GQA ratio
2
Max context
131,072
Context scaling
linear RoPE (factor 8)
Context scaling method
linear
Activation
gelu_pytorch_tanh
Attention variant
sliding-window/hybrid (5 local : 1 global)
KV cache (bytes/token)
393,216
FLOPs per active token
24,374,000,000
Open weights
yes
License
gemma
notes
TWO-PART MODEL. Identical vision design to Gemma 3 4B: SigLIP, 27 layers, hidden 1152, 16 heads, patch 14, image_size 896, no pooling -- 4,096 vision tokens per image. VISION DOMINATES, same as 4B. (2) LLM: 48 layers, hidden 3840, 16 heads / 8 KV heads, head_dim 256, intermediate 15360, vocab 262,208, max_position 131,072, rope_theta 1e6, rope_scaling {factor 8.0, linear}, sliding_window 1024. ARCHITECTURE = dense. KV CACHE: 48 * 8 * 256 * 2 * 2 = 393,216 B/token (384 KiB) -- the largest KV-per-token of any model in this slice. At 131,072 ctx that is 48.0 GiB per sequence at bf16. Same caveat as the 4B: only the 8 global-attention layers need full-length KV, the 40 sliding layers cap at 1,024 tokens, so a correct implementation stores ~6x less than this headline figure. params_b 12.187 = HF API safetensors total (12,187,325,040). PROVENANCE: gated repo (401 on raw config.json); fields read from the unsloth/gemma-3-12b-it mirror with the param total cross-checked against the gated repo's HF API entry. SERVICEABILITY JOIN (added 2026-10-03; the architecture x engine matrix this record was missing, with a citation per cell in docs/13-model-compatibility.md): FAMILY=sliding-window. REQUIRED KERNEL CLASS: a local/windowed attention decode kernel plus per-layer-type cache management. The kernel requirement is not cosmetic: flop/sliding-window-hybrid-attention records that a local layer's decode cost is constant in context (it reads exactly w KV entries) so its arithmetic intensity stays at ~1 flop/byte forever, while the global layers' bytes still grow linearly - the two layer classes have opposite scaling and one kernel must serve both. SUPPORTED BY (cited): vLLM lists sliding attention inside its fallback envelope - 'Attention types: full attention and/or sliding attention' - but ALSO has native rows for the specific SWA architectures: GptOssForCausalLM, Gemma3ForCausalLM, Gemma4ForCausalLM, Olmo3ForCausalLM, GraniteMoeSWAForCausalLM, GraniteSWAForCausalLM [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]. SGLang's generative table names GPT-OSS as 'hybrid sliding-window-attention MoE model ... with per-layer-type RoPE (YARN on full-attention layers, default on sliding-attention layers) and a softplus per-head attention gate', and lists granite-swash SWA models [[mdl2-sglang-generative-models]]. llama.cpp exposes SWA as first-class KV keys rather than a flag: %%s.attention.sliding_window and %%s.attention.sliding_window_pattern exist as distinct keys per architecture class, alongside SWA-specific width keys, which is direct evidence that SWA changes the cache layout rather than adding an attention flag [[mdl2-llamacpp-arch-class-registry]]. THE PER-CELL CONSEQUENCE: an engine WITHOUT local-attention support does not fail, it silently allocates a full-context cache for every layer. docs/13-model-compatibility.md tabulates this as the KV overpay table; for this model the naive figure in kv_cache_bytes_per_token is the worst case and the effective figure is what the windowed layers actually hold. TWO HARD GATES THAT ARE NOT ABOUT WINDOW SIZE. (1) TensorRT-LLM publishes a per-architecture 'Sliding Window Attention' column and it is NOT uniformly Yes: Yes for DeepseekV4ForCausalLM, Gemma4ForConditionalGeneration, Gemma4UnifiedForConditionalGeneration and Step3p7ForConditionalGeneration, and explicitly No for Qwen3NextForCausalLM, while the DeepSeek-V3/V3.2/GLM/GPT-OSS/Llama-4/Qwen3.5/Kimi-K3/Nemotron-H rows read N/A [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. (2) On B200 with vLLM 0.23.1rc1.dev843 + flashinfer-python 0.6.14, a 50-of-60-layer SWA Gemma-4 checkpoint with --kv-cache-dtype fp8_e4m3 and MTP spec-decode (k=7) produces fluent output containing sporadic wrong tokens and short repetition loops once seq_len passes the 1024-token window, because flashinfer's trtllm spec-as-decode kernel mis-computes sliding-window attention for BF16-Q + FP8-KV at certain seq_len/page alignments and vLLM's scale bookkeeping double-applies k/v scales - gotcha-flashinfer-bf16q-fp8kv-spec-decode-corrupts-swa, severity BLOCKER. FP8-Q + spec is clean; BF16-Q + no spec is clean; either drop quantized KV, drop spec decode, or drop the disable_flashinfer_q_quantization flag. This is the cleanest statement in the repo that quantized KV and speculative decoding are not independently safe on an SWA model. (3) FlashInfer also rejects large head sizes at engine init, which is a separate SM120 gap from the page-block one: head_size not supported for gemma-4-31b-it's head_dim 256 / global_head_dim 512 on RTX PRO 6000 [[flashinfer-rejects-large-head-dim]]. (4) On Hopper, vLLM 0.30.0's vllm_flash_attn silently ignores num_splits on SM90, costing 48% per-token decode at batch 1 for Gemma-4 26B-A4B-it global layers (1 query token, 2 KV heads, 2 of an H100's 132 SMs with work), with TRITON_ATTN recovering ~70% [[fa4-num-splits-ignored-sm90]]. (5) vLLM's own scheduler granularity interacts with SWA groups: issue #53786 asks for fine-grained prefix hits for sliding-window groups, and hybrid reconciliation already caps the combined hit at the shorter boundary [[eagle-prefix-cache-last-block-drop]]. (6) On Apple Silicon the class is a cache-CLASS problem, not a kernel problem: mlx-lm's sliding-window layers use RotatingKVCache, which had no quantized implementation, so --kv-bits passes a hasattr presence check and raises NotImplementedError on the first request instead of at startup; the fix (PR 1584) adds RotatingQuantizedKVCache, and the commonly-recommended monkeypatch silently gives up the max_kv_size window bound and yields an unbounded cache [[mlx-kv-bits-crashes-on-first-request-for-hybrid-attention]] [[mdl2-mlxlm-pr1584-rotating-quantized-kv]]. KV OVERPAY: naive 48*8,192 = 393,216 B/token; effective with local support = (8*8192*c + 40*8192*1024)/c = 65,536 + 335,544,320/c - 5.77x at 131,072 context, 5.19x at 32k, 3.69x at 8k. CONTEXT_SCALING_METHOD (linear): config-derived; the existing free text 'linear RoPE (factor 8)' agrees.

Notes

TWO-PART MODEL. Identical vision design to Gemma 3 4B: SigLIP, 27 layers, hidden 1152, 16 heads, patch 14, image_size 896, no pooling -- 4,096 vision tokens per image. VISION DOMINATES, same as 4B. (2) LLM: 48 layers, hidden 3840, 16 heads / 8 KV heads, head_dim 256, intermediate 15360, vocab 262,208, max_position 131,072, rope_theta 1e6, rope_scaling {factor 8.0, linear}, sliding_window 1024. ARCHITECTURE = dense. KV CACHE: 48 * 8 * 256 * 2 * 2 = 393,216 B/token (384 KiB) -- the largest KV-per-token of any model in this slice. At 131,072 ctx that is 48.0 GiB per sequence at bf16. Same caveat as the 4B: only the 8 global-attention layers need full-length KV, the 40 sliding layers cap at 1,024 tokens, so a correct implementation stores ~6x less than this headline figure. params_b 12.187 = HF API safetensors total (12,187,325,040). PROVENANCE: gated repo (401 on raw config.json); fields read from the unsloth/gemma-3-12b-it mirror with the param total cross-checked against the gated repo's HF API entry.

SERVICEABILITY JOIN (added 2026-10-03; the architecture x engine matrix this record was missing, with a citation per cell in docs/13-model-compatibility.md): FAMILY=sliding-window. REQUIRED KERNEL CLASS: a local/windowed attention decode kernel plus per-layer-type cache management. The kernel requirement is not cosmetic: flop/sliding-window-hybrid-attention records that a local layer's decode cost is constant in context (it reads exactly w KV entries) so its arithmetic intensity stays at ~1 flop/byte forever, while the global layers' bytes still grow linearly - the two layer classes have opposite scaling and one kernel must serve both. SUPPORTED BY (cited): vLLM lists sliding attention inside its fallback envelope - 'Attention types: full attention and/or sliding attention' - but ALSO has native rows for the specific SWA architectures: GptOssForCausalLM, Gemma3ForCausalLM, Gemma4ForCausalLM, Olmo3ForCausalLM, GraniteMoeSWAForCausalLM, GraniteSWAForCausalLM [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]. SGLang's generative table names GPT-OSS as 'hybrid sliding-window-attention MoE model ... with per-layer-type RoPE (YARN on full-attention layers, default on sliding-attention layers) and a softplus per-head attention gate', and lists granite-swash SWA models [[mdl2-sglang-generative-models]]. llama.cpp exposes SWA as first-class KV keys rather than a flag: %%s.attention.sliding_window and %%s.attention.sliding_window_pattern exist as distinct keys per architecture class, alongside SWA-specific width keys, which is direct evidence that SWA changes the cache layout rather than adding an attention flag [[mdl2-llamacpp-arch-class-registry]]. THE PER-CELL CONSEQUENCE: an engine WITHOUT local-attention support does not fail, it silently allocates a full-context cache for every layer. docs/13-model-compatibility.md tabulates this as the KV overpay table; for this model the naive figure in kv_cache_bytes_per_token is the worst case and the effective figure is what the windowed layers actually hold. TWO HARD GATES THAT ARE NOT ABOUT WINDOW SIZE. (1) TensorRT-LLM publishes a per-architecture 'Sliding Window Attention' column and it is NOT uniformly Yes: Yes for DeepseekV4ForCausalLM, Gemma4ForConditionalGeneration, Gemma4UnifiedForConditionalGeneration and Step3p7ForConditionalGeneration, and explicitly No for Qwen3NextForCausalLM, while the DeepSeek-V3/V3.2/GLM/GPT-OSS/Llama-4/Qwen3.5/Kimi-K3/Nemotron-H rows read N/A [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]. (2) On B200 with vLLM 0.23.1rc1.dev843 + flashinfer-python 0.6.14, a 50-of-60-layer SWA Gemma-4 checkpoint with --kv-cache-dtype fp8_e4m3 and MTP spec-decode (k=7) produces fluent output containing sporadic wrong tokens and short repetition loops once seq_len passes the 1024-token window, because flashinfer's trtllm spec-as-decode kernel mis-computes sliding-window attention for BF16-Q + FP8-KV at certain seq_len/page alignments and vLLM's scale bookkeeping double-applies k/v scales - gotcha-flashinfer-bf16q-fp8kv-spec-decode-corrupts-swa, severity BLOCKER. FP8-Q + spec is clean; BF16-Q + no spec is clean; either drop quantized KV, drop spec decode, or drop the disable_flashinfer_q_quantization flag. This is the cleanest statement in the repo that quantized KV and speculative decoding are not independently safe on an SWA model. (3) FlashInfer also rejects large head sizes at engine init, which is a separate SM120 gap from the page-block one: head_size not supported for gemma-4-31b-it's head_dim 256 / global_head_dim 512 on RTX PRO 6000 [[flashinfer-rejects-large-head-dim]]. (4) On Hopper, vLLM 0.30.0's vllm_flash_attn silently ignores num_splits on SM90, costing 48% per-token decode at batch 1 for Gemma-4 26B-A4B-it global layers (1 query token, 2 KV heads, 2 of an H100's 132 SMs with work), with TRITON_ATTN recovering ~70% [[fa4-num-splits-ignored-sm90]]. (5) vLLM's own scheduler granularity interacts with SWA groups: issue #53786 asks for fine-grained prefix hits for sliding-window groups, and hybrid reconciliation already caps the combined hit at the shorter boundary [[eagle-prefix-cache-last-block-drop]]. (6) On Apple Silicon the class is a cache-CLASS problem, not a kernel problem: mlx-lm's sliding-window layers use RotatingKVCache, which had no quantized implementation, so --kv-bits passes a hasattr presence check and raises NotImplementedError on the first request instead of at startup; the fix (PR 1584) adds RotatingQuantizedKVCache, and the commonly-recommended monkeypatch silently gives up the max_kv_size window bound and yields an unbounded cache [[mlx-kv-bits-crashes-on-first-request-for-hybrid-attention]] [[mdl2-mlxlm-pr1584-rotating-quantized-kv]]. KV OVERPAY: naive 48*8,192 = 393,216 B/token; effective with local support = (8*8192*c + 40*8192*1024)/c = 65,536 + 335,544,320/c - 5.77x at 131,072 context, 5.19x at 32k, 3.69x at 8k.

CONTEXT_SCALING_METHOD (linear): config-derived; the existing free text 'linear RoPE (factor 8)' agrees.

Cross-references

This record references no other records — it is a leaf. It is cited by 0.