# HiDream-I1: A High-Efficient Image Generative Foundation Model with Sparse Diffusion Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22705 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22705/

## Key facts

- Cited by 141 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 17 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)
- Mixture-of-experts / [Vision mixture-of-experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/vision-mixture-of-experts/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05135/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03860/) (2022)
- [OmniGen: Unified Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11340/) (2024)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06739/) (2023)
- [A Self-Supervised Descriptor for Image Copy Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10261/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 141)

- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Emu3.5: Native Multimodal Models are World Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26583/) (2025)
- [X-Omni: Reinforcement Learning Makes Discrete Autoregressive Image Generative Models Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22058/) (2025)
- [LongCat-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07584/) (2025)
- [ShareGPT-4o-Image: Aligning Multimodal Models with GPT-4o-Level Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18095/) (2025)
- [Pref-GRPO: Pairwise Preference Reward-based GRPO for Stable Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20751/) (2025)
- [NextStep-1: Toward Autoregressive Image Generation with Continuous Tokens at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10711/) (2025)
- [EditVerse: Unifying Image and Video Editing and Generation with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20360/) (2025)
- [FLUX-Reason-6M & PRISM-Bench: A Million-Scale Text-to-Image Reasoning Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09680/) (2025)
- [Easier Painting Than Thinking: Can Text-to-Image Models Set the Stage, but Not Direct the Play?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03516/) (2025)
- [HiDream-O1-Image: A Natively Unified Image Generative Foundation Model with Pixel-level Unified Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11061/) (2026)
- [X2Edit: Revisiting Arbitrary-Instruction Image Editing through Self-Constructed Data and Task-Aware Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07607/) (2025)
- [UniGenBench++: A Unified Semantic Evaluation Benchmark for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18701/) (2025)
- [UniREditBench: A Unified Reasoning-based Image Editing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01295/) (2025)
- [ReasonEdit: Towards Reasoning-Enhanced Image Editing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22625/) (2025)
- [Region-Constraint In-Context Generation for Instructional Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17650/) (2025)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15772/) (2025)
- [GenExam: A Multidisciplinary Text-to-Image Exam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14232/) (2025)
- [When Visualizing is the First Step to Reasoning: MIRA, a Benchmark for Visual Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02779/) (2025)
- [Factuality Matters: When Image Generation and Editing Meet Structured Visuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05091/) (2025)
- [Agent Banana: High-Fidelity Image Editing with Agentic Thinking and Tooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09084/) (2026)
- [NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Robust AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11487/) (2026)
- [MIRA: Multimodal Iterative Reasoning Agent for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21087/) (2025)
- [PICABench: How Far Are We from Physically Realistic Image Editing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17681/) (2025)
- [Query-Kontext: An Unified Multimodal Model for Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26641/) (2025)
- [GIR-Bench: Versatile Benchmark for Generating Images with Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11026/) (2025)
- [Generating an Image From 1,000 Words: Enhancing Text-to-Image With Structured Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06876/) (2025)
- [NextFlow: Unified Sequential Modeling Activates Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02204/) (2026)
- [EasyV2V: A High-quality Instruction-based Video Editing Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16920/) (2025)
- [EditMGT: Unleashing Potentials of Masked Generative Transformers in Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11715/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in image generative foundation models have prioritized quality improvements but often at the cost of increased computational complexity and inference latency. To address this critical trade-off, we introduce HiDream-I1, a new open-source image generative foundation model with 17B parameters that achieves state-of-the-art image generation quality within seconds. HiDream-I1 is constructed with a new sparse Diffusion Transformer (DiT) structure. Specifically, it starts with a dual-stream decoupled design of sparse DiT with dynamic Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, in which two separate encoders are first involved to independently process image and text tokens. Then, a single-stream sparse DiT structure with dynamic MoE architecture is adopted to trigger multi-model interaction for image generation in a cost-efficient manner. To support flexiable accessibility with varied model capabilities, we provide HiDream-I1 in three variants: HiDream-I1-Full, HiDream-I1-Dev, and HiDream-I1-Fast. Furthermore, we go beyond the typical text-to-image generation and remould HiDream-I1 with additional image conditions to perform precise, instruction-based editing on given images, yielding a new instruction-based image editing model namely HiDream-E1. Ultimately, by integrating text-to-image generation and instruction-based image editing, HiDream-I1 evolves to form a comprehensive image agent (HiDream-A1) capable of fully interactive image creation and refinement. To accelerate multi-modal AIGC research, we have open-sourced all the codes and model weights of HiDream-I1-Full, HiDream-I1-Dev, HiDream-I1-Fast, HiDream-E1 through our project websites: https://github.com/HiDream-ai/HiDream-I1 and https://github.com/HiDream-ai/HiDream-E1. All features can be directly experienced via https://vivago.ai/studio.