The previous commit said the capability should go to gemma-4-14b-8k or
Qwen3.5-9B and implied more finality than had been earned — neither had been
tested at that point. Both now have been, on the same two images and the same
prompt:

    gemma-4-31B-heretic   'Red square.'  / 'Blue circle.'
    gemma-4-14b-8k        'Red square.'  / 'Blue circle.'
    Qwen3.5-9B            'red square'   / 'Blue Circle'
    qwen38                the same sentence for both

gemma-4-31B-heretic is the one to reach for: larger than the broken 27B, already
on disk with its own projector, exact on both images.

That also narrows the fault to the qwen3vl_merger graph alone. gemma4v is correct
at two model sizes, and Qwen3.5's own vision tower is correct when transformers
runs it instead of llama.cpp — so it is not the model, not the family, and not
our pipeline.

And a warning that matters more than the finding: the llama-cpp-python here is a
LOCAL SOURCE BUILD with -DGGML_CUDA=ON -DGGML_VULKAN=ON -DGGML_RPC=ON, which is
the entire reason it exists. I had noted 0.3.36 is current on PyPI in a way that
reads as "pip install -U", and a PyPI wheel carries at most one backend:
installing one would take out the nvidia engine, the radeon/Vulkan engine and the
cluster's GGUF-over-RPC path together, to chase one projector. The upgrade is a
version bump in packaging/linux/Dockerfile.update-llama plus
update_oci_image.sh REBUILD_LLAMA=1. Written down so nobody reaches for pip.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014T3rZozi1Ehk96NG1WesgC