Curiosity · AI Model
LLaVA 1.6 34B
LLaVA 1.6 34B (also called LLaVA-NeXT) is an open-weight vision-language model from the LLaVA research team, pairing the Nous-Hermes-2-Yi-34B LLM with a CLIP-ViT vision encoder. Released in early 2024, it was among the strongest open VLMs at the time, with improved image resolution and reasoning over LLaVA 1.5, and remains a widely-cited reference point for open-source multimodal research.
Model specs
- Vendor
- LLaVA Project
- Family
- LLaVA
- Released
- 2024-01
- Context window
- 4,096 tokens
- Modalities
- text, vision
Strengths
- Widely cited reference VLM with solid ecosystem
- LLaVA-NeXT improvements push image resolution and reasoning
- Apache-2.0 compatible via Yi base licence
Limitations
- No multi-image or video support
- Surpassed by Molmo 72B and frontier closed VLMs
- Short 4k context
Use cases
- Open-source visual Q&A and image captioning
- Fine-tuning baseline for domain-specific VLMs
- Academic reproducibility studies
- Teaching CLIP + LLM adapter architectures
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score | As of |
|---|---|---|
| MMMU | ~51% | 2026-04 |
| DocVQA | ~84% | 2026-04 |
| ChartQA | ~68% | 2026-04 |
Frequently asked questions
What is LLaVA 1.6 34B?
LLaVA 1.6 34B (also marketed as LLaVA-NeXT) is an open-weight vision-language model combining the Nous-Hermes-2-Yi-34B LLM with a CLIP-ViT image encoder. It was the strongest LLaVA-family VLM at release in early 2024.
Is LLaVA 1.6 still the best open VLM?
No. Models like Molmo 72B and Qwen2-VL surpass it on most benchmarks in 2025-2026. But LLaVA 1.6 remains a common reference baseline, especially for teaching and fine-tuning.
Sources
- LLaVA-NeXT on HuggingFace — accessed 2026-04-20
- LLaVA project page — accessed 2026-04-20