Alibaba releases Qwen-Image-Edit, an open-source foundation model for image editing

Alibaba’s Qwen team has introduced Qwen-Image-Edit on Hugging Face as an open-source image editing foundation model. Built on the Qwen-Image architecture, it allows both high-level semantic edits, such as object manipulation and style transfer, and low-level appearance adjustments, including adding or removing elements with minimal disruption to surrounding content.

A key feature is its ability to modify text within images in both English and Chinese while preserving font, size, and style. This makes it suitable for design and localization workflows where text fidelity is critical. The model demonstrates state-of-the-art benchmark performance across editing tasks and completes simple edits within seconds.

Qwen-Image-Edit is released under the Apache-2.0 license, making it available for both research and commercial applications. To address hardware requirements, the team has provided a compressed DFloat11 variant that reduces model size by one-third and enables use on a single 32 GB GPU, with the option of CPU offloading for smaller configurations.

Deployment options include running locally on high-memory GPUs or accessing the model through Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio. The release gives developers and enterprises an open-source alternative to proprietary image editing tools, with flexibility for integration into creative, enterprise, and consumer-facing workflows.