# LFM3 (1.7B)

> Liquid AI's 1.73B dense hybrid combines short convolutions with sliding-window and global GQA in a 24-layer stack.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Lab | Liquid AI (United States) |
| Released | 2026-10-27 |
| Decoder type | Dense hybrid |
| Family | Dense hybrid |
| Scale | 1.73B parameters |
| Context window | 262,144 tokens |
| Attention | ShortConv plus gated GQA with QK-Norm and sliding-window/global attention |
| Layer mix | 13 ShortConv + 5 sliding-window + 6 global GQA |
| KV cache / token (bf16) | 22 KiB (Very low) |
| License | LFM Open License v1.0 |

**Key detail:** Uses kernel-7 ShortConv, a 256-token attention window, per-head sigmoid gates, and sandwich RMSNorm. Global attention uses 50% partial RoPE.

## Architecture concepts

- [Short Convolution (ShortConv)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/shortconv.md): A tiny causal depthwise convolution (kernel ≈ 4) that mixes each channel over the last few tokens.
- [Grouped-Query Attention (GQA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/gqa.md): Several query heads share one key/value head, shrinking the KV cache with little quality loss.
- [Sliding Window Attention (SWA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/swa.md): Some layers only attend to a local window of recent tokens instead of the whole context.
- [Gated Attention (Gated attention)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/gated-attention.md): A learned sigmoid gate scales the attention output before it re-enters the residual stream.
- [QK-Norm (QK-Norm)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/qk-norm.md): RMSNorm applied to queries and keys before attention to keep logits well-behaved.

## Links

- Architecture diagram: https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/images/architectures/lfm3-1-7b.webp
- config.json: https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B/blob/main/config.json
- License: https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B/blob/main/LICENSE
- Tech report: https://huggingface.co/blog/LiquidAI/lfm3
- Source card (source of truth): https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/#card-lfm3-1-7b
- Web page: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/models/lfm3-1-7b/
- JSON: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/api/models/lfm3-1-7b.json

_Data from Sebastian Raschka's LLM Architecture Gallery (https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/). Synced 2026-11-04._