Observed Signal · May 18, 2026 · Technical Report · Source: DEV Community · Impact: 3/5 · Sentiment: Neutral
Gemma4:e4b Returns Empty Responses on Meta Stages
A developer field report (drafted 2026-05-18) documents reproducible failures when running Gemma 4's efficient variant (gemma4:e4b) through a local Graph‑RAG pipeline (PROJECT JAMES v0.3.x) via an Ollama backend. Five of nine cognitive stages (query rewrite, web summary, reflect.critique, verify.fact_check, plan.decompose) produced HTTP 200 responses with an empty model output; swapping to gemma3:12b resolved the issue and produced successful outputs for the same prompts. The author provides a reproducible environment, tabulated traces, and four candidate hypotheses (insufficient meta-reasoning capacity at 4B, early stop-token emission, Korean-instruction + English-JSON schema confusion, and a prompt‑truncation artifact in JAMES). Reproduction steps and tests are included; no definitive root cause was determined.
Reproducible technical failure affecting local LLM orchestration and agentic Graph‑RAG pipelines; relevant to teams running local Gemma models and Ollama backends but not an industry-wide platform policy or major release.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- The author observed gemma4:e4b produced empty string responses for five cognitive stages while Ollama returned HTTP 200.
- Swapping the single env var to gemma3:12b caused the same end‑to‑end prompts and pipeline to succeed across all stages.
- Empty responses clustered at ~2–4 seconds per call; successful stages took substantially longer (e.g., synth.rag 13.7s).
- The report includes a reproducible setup (PROJECT JAMES v0.3.x, Ollama local backend, models gemma4:e4b and gemma3:12b) and a reproduction script.
- Author lists four hypotheses: meta‑reasoning capacity floor at 4B, premature stop-token emission, Korean+English JSON schema confusion, and a JAMES prompt truncation bug.
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