A pruned version of google/gemma-4-e2b-it optimized for Arabic and English vision-language tasks. Unnecessary language tokens and the audio encoder have been removed, resulting in a smaller and more efficient model while retaining full vision and text generation capabilities.

What was done

Component	Original	Pruned
Vocabulary	262,144 tokens	209,836 tokens (Arabic + English + special)
Vision encoder	✅ 16 layers	✅ KEPT
Audio encoder	✅ 12 layers	❌ Removed
Decoder layers	35 layers	35 layers (untouched)
PLE tables	262,144 × 256 × 35	209,836 × 256 × 35
Total size (bf16)	10.2 GB	8.5 GB
Size reduction	—	17%

Token breakdown

Arabic tokens kept: 8,460
English/Latin tokens kept: 201,096
Special tokens: 24
Byte fallbacks: 256
Total kept: 209,836 (80.0% of original)
Dropped: 52,308 (CJK, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Thai, etc.)

Why this exists

Gemma 4's Per-Layer Embedding (PLE) architecture stores a separate embedding table for each of its 35 decoder layers. With 262K vocab, that's 4.7 GB of PLE tables alone (53% of the model). By pruning to Arabic+English only, we cut this to ~3.8 GB.

The vision encoder is kept intact for image understanding tasks.

Benchmark: Arabic text recognition (zero-shot, no fine-tuning)

Evaluated on loay/ar_stage1_probe — 100 samples, seed=42:

Model	Params	VRAM	CER ↓	Exact Match
This model (pruned)	4.25B	8.5 GB	0.1168	23/100
google/gemma-4-e2b-it (original)	5.10B	10.2 GB	0.1168	23/100

Identical output on all 100 samples — pruning is lossless for Arabic+English tasks.

Intended use

Arabic + English vision-language tasks
Document understanding
Fine-tuning base for bilingual Arabic/English applications
Any task where CJK/Cyrillic/Indic language support is not needed

Usage

python

from transformers import AutoModelForImageTextToText, AutoProcessor

model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(
    "ml-agent-explorers/gemma-4-e2b-arabic-english-vision",
    dtype="bfloat16",
    device_map="auto",
)
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(
    "ml-agent-explorers/gemma-4-e2b-arabic-english-vision"
)

Base model

google/gemma-4-e2b-it

ml-intern-explorers/gemma-4-e2b-arabic-english-vision

Gemma 4 E2B — Arabic + English Vision (Pruned)