Alibaba's Qwen team announced on September 20 that it has open-sourced its latest image model, Qwen-Image-2.1, a release designed to balance generation quality, inference efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. The model integrates text-to-image and image editing into a single framework, with the vision generation component featuring just 7 billion parameters and native support for creating and editing transparent images.

According to the official release, Qwen-Image-2.1 can generate either standard images or transparent images based on prompts, while also supporting transparent layer editing and background removal. The model accepts up to 10 reference images to enhance local editing and improve fidelity for portraits and products across various editing tasks. Its lightweight architecture and optimized inference process strike a balance between output quality and computational expense.

This open-source move underscores Alibaba's commitment to advancing accessible AI tools, offering developers a flexible solution for diverse image creation and manipulation workflows.