Imagen 4 Ultra

Alibaba has officially ended 2025 by releasing **Qwen-Image-2512**, currently the world’s strongest open-source text-to-image model. Benchmarks from the AI Arena confirm it is now performing within the same tier as Google’s flagship proprietary models.

**The Performance Data:** In over 10,000 blind evaluation rounds, **Qwen-Image-2512** effectively matching Imagen 4 Ultra and challenging **Gemini 3 Pro.**

This is the **first time** an open-source weights model has consistently rivaled the top three closed-source giants in visual fidelity.

**Key Upgrades:**

**Skin & Hair Realism:** The model features a specific architectural update to reduce the **"AI plastic look"** focusing on natural skin pores and realistic hair textures.

**Complex Material Rendering:** Significant improvements in difficult-to-render textures like water ripples, landscapes and animal fur.

**Layout & Text Quality:** Building on the Qwen-VL foundation, it handles multi-line text and professional-grade layout composition with high precision.

**Open Weights Availability:** True to their roadmap, Alibaba has open-sourced the model **weights** under the Apache 2.0 license, making them available on Hugging Face and ModelScope for immediate local deployment.

[Source: Qwen Blog](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-image-2512)
[Source: Hugging Face Repository](https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen-Image-2512-GGUF)

Google's Imagen 4 and Imagen 4 Ultra are being sunset on June 30 but are essentially the only models out there that can reliably output a convincing 1990s "Disney renaissance" look, with the blurry-edge shading that defines the [CAPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Animation_Production_System)\-style of that era. So I'm trying to distill it into something that can be used until I come across another model that can do this.

I've made my first Illustrious 2.0 LoRA (through TensorArt because my graphics card is busted and I already had an account with them since before they started censoring everything) with a purely Imagen 4-generated 100 image dataset of 16:9, 1408x768 graphics. I did Repeat 3 / Epoch 10 = 2910 steps. Auto-labelled with "wd-v1-4-vit-tagger-v2". And the resulting images absolutely do capture the style, but... the result is a little wonky, it's got random artifacts, often shitty lines, weird eyes, IDK, the way AI gen looked like 2 years ago? Back when "AI slop" didn't mean it looked too polished, but that it actually looked sloppy?

It'd be easy to just jump back in and add more images, do more steps, but I've already wasted nearly $10 so I'd be so thankful if somebody with more experience could hint what I might be doing wrong. Should I use Imagen 4 ultra images for training instead? They tend to be a little sharper and I can get at 2x the resolution, though they cost $0.06 per image. Or should I try and automate some de-noising or upscaling or sharpening of the training set I already have? Or is like... my LoRA essentially fine and what is vexing me is just the limitations of using an older local model like Illustrious 2.0?

Edit: also tried doing a Qwen Image Edit 2511 LoRA (through FAL's trainer) that would just change the character but the results were not great there either)

EDIT2: After a lot of back and forth I realized what's bothering me is probably just that Illustrious is a very out of date model that's pretty far behind the curve. I re-evaluaed my Qwen Image Edit 2511 LoRA and while it does also edit the background (despite me not touching the backgrounds at all in the pairs!) it's actually really good for getting the character design right, so I guess I'll just fix the backgrounds manually instead.