# Multimodal architecture & growth

**Version 1.2 · July 2026**

## Summary

Arriella supports multimodal work in **two different ways**:

1. **Routed vision (core text tiers)** — image paths → Gemma3 description → Scout / Growth / Flagship / Ascension
2. **Native Omni (Grapevine extension)** — Qwen2.5-Omni-3B student with vision/audio (and pre-export video) — [grapevine.md](../guides/grapevine.md)

Core text tiers also support:

- **Thinking** — Ollama `--think` ↔ Arriella `/think`…`/answer` (or `<scratchpad>` / `<answer>`); Ascension uses DeepSeek-native think
- **Post-deploy growth** — artifact ingest + organic LoRA grow

Certification notes and older wording live in [`../archive/2026-07/FLEET_MULTIMODAL_PAPER.md`](../archive/2026-07/FLEET_MULTIMODAL_PAPER.md). This page is the maintained version.

## Architecture A — routed (core text)

```
User image ──► Gemma3 (Ollama) ──► categorized description
                     │
User prompt ──► Arriella text tier
                  think=true → scratchpad / thinking channel
                  answer body → user
```

Text tiers **never** see raw pixels on this workstation’s VRAM budget. Vision is behavior absorbed via `vision_teacher_anchor` distill grows — not by stuffing a VLM into 0.5–1.8B weights.

Thinking is absorbed similarly from family-matched teachers (`qwen3:0.6b`, `lfm2.5-thinking:1.2b`, `deepseek-r1:1.5b`, etc.).

## Architecture B — native Omni (Grapevine)

```
User text / image / audio ──► Qwen2.5-Omni-3B (+ Arriella LoRA + mmproj)
                                  ↓
                         Ollama arriella-grapevine
```

Grapevine is a **fleet extension**, not a fifth core text model. Inkling is a capability target only. Details and smoke vs Flagship: [grapevine.md](../guides/grapevine.md), root [`grapevine.md`](../../grapevine.md).

## Growth paths

| Path | Script / entry | Use |
|------|----------------|-----|
| Artifact ingest | `fleet_artifact_ingest.py` | `ollama:` / `lora:` / `hf:` teachers |
| Organic grow | `fleet_organic.py`, `fleet_grow.py` | Datasets / multimodal anchors |
| Grapevine repair | `prepare_grapevine_*`, `train_arriella_inkling_local.py` | Omni identity / deployment repair |

Example (text tier):

```powershell
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe scripts\fleet_organic.py --id arriella-growth --multimodal
```

## Formats

See [../guides/reasoning-format.md](../guides/reasoning-format.md).