Qwen Image

• 🏢 Alibaba Qwen team's first image generation foundation model.
• 📏 20B-parameter Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture.
• 📚 Excels at complex text rendering, especially Chinese scripts.
• 🔧 Handles both image generation and precise image editing.
• 👁️ Also supports detection, segmentation, depth and edge estimation.
• 🔒 Open-weights under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.
• 🆕 Foundation for later Qwen Image 2 and Edit variants.

Alibaba

Alibaba Group is a Chinese multinational technology company founded in 1999 and headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Originally built around e-commerce and cloud computing, Alibaba has become one of the most prolific contributors to open-weight AI research,…

Qwen Image is the first image generation foundation model released by Alibaba's Qwen team, a 20B-parameter Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. Its defining strength is high-fidelity text rendering across diverse images, preserving typographic detail, layout coherence and contextual harmony for both alphabetic languages like English and logographic scripts like Chinese. The model is more than a generator: it also supports image understanding tasks including object detection, semantic segmentation, depth and edge (Canny) estimation, novel view synthesis, and super-resolution.

As the base release, it anchors a growing family. The editing companion, Qwen Edit 2511, extends Qwen Image's text-rendering ability to instruction-based editing, feeding the input image into Qwen2.5-VL for semantic control and a VAE encoder for appearance control, enabling bilingual text edits while preserving font, size and style.

The lineage later advanced with Qwen Image 2 and its higher-fidelity Qwen Image 2 Pro tier, alongside their editing counterparts, building on the foundation that the original release established. Alibaba also exposes the family through its Model Studio text-to-image API for production use.

For users wanting the original open-weight foundation with strong compositional control and bilingual typography, Qwen Image remains the accessible Apache 2.0 starting point that the rest of the family was constructed upon.