mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

LongCat-Image Technical Report

arXiv 2512.07584 ↗First posted 8 Dec 2025cs.CVcited by 92

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce LongCat-Image, a pioneering open-source and bilingual (Chinese-English) foundation model for image generation, designed to address core challenges in multilingual text rendering, photorealism, deployment efficiency, and developer accessibility prevalent in current leading models. 1) We achieve this through rigorous data curation strategies across the pre-training, mid-training, and SFT stages, complemented by the coordinated use of curated reward models during the RL phase. This strategy establishes the model as a new state-of-the-art (SOTA), delivering superior text-rendering capabilities and remarkable photorealism, and significantly enhancing aesthetic quality. 2) Notably, it sets a new industry standard for Chinese character rendering. By supporting even complex and rare characters, it outperforms both major open-source and commercial solutions in coverage, while also achieving superior accuracy. 3) The model achieves remarkable efficiency through its compact design. With a core diffusion model of only 6B parameters, it is significantly smaller than the nearly 20B or larger Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures common in the field. This ensures minimal VRAM usage and rapid inference, significantly reducing deployment costs. Beyond generation, LongCat-Image also excels in image editing, achieving SOTA results on standard benchmarks with superior editing consistency compared to other open-source works. 4) To fully empower the community, we have established the most comprehensive open-source ecosystem to date. We are releasing not only multiple model versions for text-to-image and image editing, including checkpoints after mid-training and post-training stages, but also the entire toolchain of training procedure. We believe that the openness of LongCat-Image will provide robust support for developers and researchers, pushing the frontiers of visual content creation.

Key facts. Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 62 of its 67 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

Builds on

62 of 67 references.

References · 62

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  3. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
  4. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
  5. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  6. 2021RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embeddingcited by 4,581
  7. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
  8. 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,290
  9. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,151
  10. 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,131
  11. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,094
  12. 2022Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Modelscited by 2,997
38 more
  1. 2022InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructionscited by 2,591
  2. 2024Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scalingcited by 1,573
  3. 2021MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformercited by 1,058
  4. 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 973
  5. 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 960
  6. 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 946
  7. 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 855
  8. 2023PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 854
  9. 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
  10. 2023Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 767
  11. 2024Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Needcited by 761
  12. 2024Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 734
  13. 2023MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 615
  14. 2023Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levelscited by 489
  15. 2024ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignmentcited by 455
  16. 2024Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 447
  17. 2025Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editingcited by 417
  18. 2021OCR-free Document Understanding Transformercited by 400
  19. 2024OmniGen: Unified Image Generationcited by 388
  20. 2025DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generationcited by 388
  21. 2023DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Freecited by 346
  22. 2024PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generationcited by 326
  23. 2024Hunyuan-DiT: A Powerful Multi-Resolution Diffusion Transformer with Fine-Grained Chinese Understandingcited by 294
  24. 2024UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scalecited by 266
  25. 2024Playground v2.5: Three Insights towards Enhancing Aesthetic Quality in Text-to-Image Generationcited by 249
  26. 2025OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generationcited by 241
  27. 2024AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Ideacited by 235
  28. 2025Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generationcited by 233
  29. 2025Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueriescited by 231
  30. 2025ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmarkcited by 225
  31. 2025In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformercited by 199
  32. 2025WISE: A World Knowledge-Informed Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 196
  33. 2023SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 174
  34. 2024JanusFlow: Harmonizing Autoregression and Rectified Flow for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 162
  35. 2025Seedream 3.0 Technical Reportcited by 146
  36. 2024OmniEdit: Building Image Editing Generalist Models Through Specialist Supervisioncited by 145
  37. 2025HunyuanImage 3.0 Technical Reportcited by 138
  38. 2025PaddleOCR 3.0 Technical Reportcited by 136

50 most cited of 62 All 62 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 91.

92 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2026FireRed-Image-Edit-1.0 Technical Reportcited by 31
  2. 2026Qwen-Image-2.0 Technical Reportcited by 28
  3. 2026SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecturecited by 27
  4. 2026Gen-Searcher: Reinforcing Agentic Search for Image Generationcited by 25
  5. 2026InternVL-U: Democratizing Unified Multimodal Models for Understanding, Reasoning, Generation and Editingcited by 23
  6. 2026Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 17
  7. 2026GenEvolve: Self-Evolving Image Generation Agents via Tool-Orchestrated Visual Experience Distillationcited by 15
  8. 2026DeepGen 1.0: A Lightweight Unified Multimodal Model for Advancing Image Generation and Editingcited by 14
  9. 2026LLaDA2.0-Uni: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Diffusion Large Language Modelcited by 12
  10. 2026GEditBench v2: A Human-Aligned Benchmark for General Image Editingcited by 11
  11. 2026JoyAI-Image: Awaking Spatial Intelligence in Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 10
  12. 2026RealRestorer: Towards Generalizable Real-World Image Restoration with Large-Scale Image Editing Modelscited by 9
38 more
  1. 2026RPiAE: A Representation-Pivoted Autoencoder Enhancing Both Image Generation and Editingcited by 7
  2. 2026BizGenEval: A Systematic Benchmark for Commercial Visual Content Generationcited by 7
  3. 2026SpatialEdit: Benchmarking Fine-Grained Image Spatial Editingcited by 7
  4. 2026L2P: Unlocking Latent Potential for Pixel Generationcited by 7
  5. 2026WeEdit: A Dataset, Benchmark and Glyph-Guided Framework for Text-centric Image Editingcited by 6
  6. 2026Edit-Compass & EditReward-Compass: A Unified Benchmark for Image Editing and Reward Modelingcited by 6
  7. 2026GUI-GenBench: Evaluating Image Generation Models as Interactive GUI Environmentscited by 5
  8. 2026Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modelingcited by 5
  9. 2026OScaR: The Occam's Razor for Extreme KV Cache Quantization in LLMs and Beyondcited by 5
  10. 2026RS-Gen: A Multi-Stage Agentic Framework for Reasoning and Search-Augmented Image Generationcited by 5
  11. 2026COMFYCLAW: Self-Evolving Skill Harnesses for Image Generation Workflowscited by 5
  12. 2026Boogu-Image-0.1: Boosting Open Agentic Multimodal Generation via Understanding under a Minimal Budgetcited by 5
  13. 2026Edit2Restore:Few-Shot Image Restoration via Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Editing Modelscited by 4
  14. 2026GenArena: How Can We Achieve Human-Aligned Evaluation for Visual Generation Tasks?cited by 4
  15. 2026DreamLite: A Lightweight On-Device Unified Model for Image Generation and Editingcited by 4
  16. 2026Continuous-Time Distribution Matching for Few-Step Diffusion Distillationcited by 4
  17. 2026Lens: Rethinking Training Efficiency for Foundational Text-to-Image Modelscited by 4
  18. 2026ETS: Energy-Guided Test-Time Scaling for Training-Free RL Alignmentcited by 3
  19. 2026CoCoEdit: Content-Consistent Image Editing via Region Regularized Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  20. 2026Z-Erase: Enabling Concept Erasure in Single-Stream Diffusion Transformerscited by 3
  21. 2026Open-Source Image Editing Models Are Zero-Shot Vision Learnerscited by 3
  22. 2026Learning Action Manifold with Multi-view Latent Priors for Robotic Manipulationcited by 3
  23. 2026CMuon: Accelerating and Stabilizing Diffusion Transformer Training via Chunked Momentum Orthogonalizationcited by 3
  24. 2026SenseNova-U1.5: Towards Native Unified Visual Intelligencecited by 3
  25. 2026VIBE: Visual Instruction Based Editorcited by 2
  26. 2026When the Prompt Becomes Visual: Vision-Centric Jailbreak Attacks for Large Image Editing Modelscited by 2
  27. 2026HY-WU (Part I): An Extensible Functional Neural Memory Framework and An Instantiation in Text-Guided Image Editingcited by 2
  28. 2026DDA-Thinker: Decoupled Dual-Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Image Editingcited by 2
  29. 2026Where, What, Why, and Importance: Structured Defect Grounding for Text-to-Image Feedbackcited by 2
  30. 2026InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generationcited by 2
  31. 2026OrthoTryOn: Geometric Orthogonalization for Conflict-Free Unified Fashion Generationcited by 2
  32. 2025ContextDrag: Precise Drag-Based Image Editing via Context-Preserving Token Injection and Position-Aligned Attentioncited by 1
  33. 2026Generating a Paracosm for Training-Free Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrievalcited by 1
  34. 2026Amber-Image: Efficient Compression of Large-Scale Diffusion Transformerscited by 1
  35. 2026Can Unified Generation and Understanding Models Maintain Semantic Equivalence Across Different Output Modalities?cited by 1
  36. 2026MER-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Meme Reappraisalcited by 1
  37. 2026MSRAMIE: Multimodal Structured Reasoning Agent for Multi-instruction Image Editingcited by 1
  38. 2026GIDE: Unlocking Diffusion LLMs for Precise Training-Free Image Editingcited by 1

50 most cited of 92 All 92 (JSON)

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026UltraText Bench: A Comprehensive Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Text Rendering in Image Generation
  2. 2024ScImage: How Good Are Multimodal Large Language Models at Scientific Text-to-Image Generation?
  3. 2023GlyphDraw: Seamlessly Rendering Text with Intricate Spatial Structures in Text-to-Image Generation
  4. 2024OpenING: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Judging Open-ended Interleaved Image-Text Generation
  5. 2026WeGenBench: A Multidimensional Diagnostic Benchmark towards Text-to-Image Model Optimization
  6. 2026InnoText: A Unified Model for Visual Text Generation and Editing
  7. 2024Empowering Backbone Models for Visual Text Generation with Input Granularity Control and Glyph-Aware Training
  8. 2025ShareGPT-4o-Image: Aligning Multimodal Models with GPT-4o-Level Image Generation