5 empty responses from gemma4:e4b. 4 hypotheses. 0 root cause.

A field report on Gemma 4 e4b in a Graph-RAG pipeline found five silent empty responses across nine short meta-reasoning stages.

Gemma 3 12b completed the same tasks, suggesting the issue may be model- or setup-specific rather than a general pipeline failure.

The write-up treats the behavior as a documented pattern with open hypotheses, not a confirmed root cause.

The report is useful for operators debugging prompt templates, stop tokens, or other local-LLM configuration issues in Ollama-based setups.