# Gemma 4 Architecture Reference

> Sources: Google DeepMind blog, HuggingFace blog (huggingface.co/blog/gemma4),
> Maarten Grootendorst visual guide, kaitchup.substack.com, wavespeed.ai

## Model Family

| Variant | Total Params | Effective Params | Type | Notes |
|---------|-------------|-----------------|------|-------|
| E2B | ~5.1B | ~2.3B | Dense + PLE | On-device, audio+vision |
| E4B | ~8B | ~4B | Dense + PLE | On-device, audio+vision |
| 31B | 31B | 31B | Dense | 60 layers, widened vs Gemma 3 27B (62 layers) |
| 26B A4B | 26B | ~4B active | MoE | 128 experts, 8 active + 1 shared |

## Attention Architecture

- **Pattern:** Local (sliding window) interleaved with global attention
  - E2B: 4:1 ratio (4 local, 1 global). E4B/31B/26B: 5:1 ratio
  - Global attention is always the last layer
- **Sliding window:** E2B/E4B = 512 tokens; 31B/26B = 1024 tokens
- **Grouped Query Attention (GQA):**
  - Local: 2 query heads share 1 KV head
  - Global: 8 query heads share 1 KV head, doubled Key dimensions

## Positional Encoding: Proportional RoPE (p-RoPE)

- Applied to global attention layers only
- p=0.25 -> rotates only 25% of head dimensions
- theta=1M
- 75% of dimensions are position-independent -> better long-context extrapolation
- Replaces Gemma 3's 8x linear frequency scaling

## Per-Layer Embeddings (PLE) — E2B/E4B Only

- Each decoder layer gets its own unique token representation
- Parallel lower-dimensional pathway alongside main residual stream
- PLE dimensions: 256 (E2B), 2560 (E4B)
- Original embedding dimensions: 1536 (E2B), 2560 (E4B)
- Applied between decoder blocks with gating function
- This is why E2B has 5.1B total but only 2.3B effective — the PLE table is large

## Shared KV Cache

- Last N layers reuse K/V tensors from earlier layers (same attention type)
- No quality loss in practice
- Significant memory + compute savings for long-context generation

## Vision Encoder

- Params: 150M (E2B/E4B), 550M (31B/26B)
- Patch size: 16x16 pixels
- 3x3 neighboring patches merged into single embedding
- Uses 2D RoPE for variable aspect ratio
- Token budgets: 70, 140, 280, 560, 1120 soft tokens
- Approximate resolutions: 272x176 (70 tokens) -> 1088x704 (1120 tokens)

## Audio Encoder — E2B/E4B Only

- Conformer architecture with convolutional modules
- Mel-spectrogram feature extraction
- Two 2D conv layers for downsampling
- NOT available on 31B or 26B variants

## MoE Details (26B A4B)

- 128 total experts
- 8 experts activated per token
- 1 shared expert (3x size of regular experts)
- 119 experts unused during any given forward pass

## Context Window

| Variant | Context Window | MRCR v2 8-needle @ 128K |
|---------|---------------|------------------------|
| E2B | 128K | 19.1% |
| E4B | 128K | 25.4% |
| 26B A4B | 256K | 44.1% |
| 31B | 256K | 66.4% |
| Gemma 3 27B | 128K | 13.5% |

- Ollama default num_ctx: 2048 (must override!)
- Retrieval accuracy diminishes beyond ~100K tokens in repetitive/unstructured text

## Vocabulary

- SentencePiece tokenizer, 262,144 tokens (256K vocab, up from 256K in earlier Gemma)

## Memory Requirements (approximate)

| Model | BF16 | 8-bit | 4-bit |
|-------|------|-------|-------|
| E2B | 9.6 GB | 4.6 GB | 3.2 GB |
| E4B | 15 GB | 7.5 GB | 5 GB |
| 31B Dense | 58.3 GB | 30.4 GB | 17.4 GB |
| 26B A4B (MoE) | 48 GB | 25 GB | 15.6 GB |

Note: 26B MoE requires ALL 26B params loaded despite only activating ~4B per token.

## License

Apache 2.0 — major change from Gemma 3's proprietary "Gemma Terms of Use". No custom clauses, no redistribution restrictions.

## Training Data Cutoff

January 2025
