Songwei Ge

Training Models @Reve. Previously Ph.D. student at @UMDCS.

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

Reve 2.0 is here! Ever since we moved away from the latent autoencoder, we are making yet another bet to move away from the pure text-input for image generation!

[Reve @reve]

Today, we’re launching Reve 2.0, the best 4K image model in the world.

We invented a new way to generate and edit any image using precise layouts. For the first time, it’s possible to create images you can touch.

[Hang Gao @hangg70]

we made a new model for text-to-image generation and editing. the results are looking good and the leaderboard is looking strong. it turns out that nano banana 2 is not impossible to beat, which felt like the case at the beginning of the year. there are a lot of great models out there that get released often. why should you care about reve 2.0?

to me, there are mainly two reasons. one being that reve is an underdog, reasonably funded but magnitudes less than other big labs, e.g. oai, google, meta, etc. you might be curious about how we managed to make it to the top. two being that reve 2.0 is a decent model, and we as a team are willing to talk openly about some of our learnings and thoughts that could be helpful. in this post, i want to share mine on reve 2.0 and multimodal in general as a person working on it.

first things first, reve 2.0 is a pixel diffusion model with a thing that we call "layout" as the rendering representation. these two things are our research bets that turned out to work amazingly well. pixel diffusion lets us go 4k without sacrificing quality or speed. layout lets us scale better and have better control, which are two sides of the same coin. the field standard has been to use long upsampled prompts for rendering. yet this results in an awkward situation where captioners and users need to describe precise controls with text, which can be inaccurate. this inaccuracy amounts to bad reconstruction and control at test time. it gets worse with scale. and this inherent ambiguity is a curse in current multimodal generators. so what's a layout? a layout is a css of an image, which can be either defined by humans or learned by models. we end up capitalizing a lot on regions, which are good for 2D space. yet this idea naturally generalizes. it turns out to be a standard VLM mid-training task, and that's solvable in good hands. it also brings many good properties in pretraining and post-training, which i am not going to expand on. ideogram independently verified that layout is useful (released on the same day, congrats!). to be clear, these bets are not novel, but to put together a system that makes them work is (and showing it beats nano banana 2).

second, it's nice that these bets, among others, worked out. however, like in many cases, there was a long time when things were underperforming. our competitor models are great, and most likely didn't make many risky bets. it is a big pipelining and engineering problem. why should we risk it? in retrospect, the culture of our team and leadership helped a lot. our priorities didn't swing and have stayed focused during our development. the idea makes sense, the execution is good, if things don't work out it's a bug, let's go find it and try more things. by and large, reve remains a research lab with big computers. this is rare. let me tag some amazing ppl here: @Taesung @m_gharbi @Songwei_Ge @TianweiY James Hong @dima_smirnov_ @theSidlak, ... the list goes on.

third, we spent most of our time improving text-to-image and didn't do much on editing. and our arena ranks show that. to date, we are #2 on text-to-image yet #9 on image editing. it's honestly a bit embarrassing that we didn't do well in editing, as layout promises to do well. but i am confident that this will improve, as we are juggling bandwidth and resources (we are a small team, and hey, come join us!).

fourth, talking about leaderboards and the state of multimodal, i genuinely feel that the gap between labs is shrinking. compared to LLMs, multimodal gen is at least half a year to a year behind. i am talking about architectures and core pipelines. to do good multimodal, you need to do good LLMs. reve has been helped by the OSS community a lot, but we've realized we need to own our language stack. and scaling follows naturally. leaderboards, in turn, are a noisy approximation and average of the real environments that you care about in deployment. they chase scaling and generalizable post-training. reve 2.0 ended up not being driven much by leaderboard evaluation, but relying on our intuition instead.

finally, how can multimodal be more useful? this is a question that keeps me up at night. coding has found its product-market fit and is driving up societal productivity. how can multimodal do that too? to me, we are nailing a single-round rollout that leads to an infinite one. this infinite rollout will drive our digital interaction and creation. for this rollout to be good, it needs to be precise. otherwise rollout efficiency is too low for either humans or agents. we are making bets and concrete progress towards that goal, such as converting images into a css-like layout. if you are interested in this topic, i recommend @stuffyokodraws's post for a high-level digest: https://t.co/mg42EZkd2h. the success of multimodal depends on whether or not it can find a good product-market fit. that's the top question to figure out, then it's the model. it's quite non-linear to be honest, as critical pieces are still missing. but to me it's an area worth pouring my thoughts and efforts into.

give our model a spin, try your tasks, move some boxes. in case you find any bugs, please let me know in a reply or DM. hope it can help you.

[Reve @reve]

Today, we’re launching Reve 2.0, the best 4K image model in the world.

We invented a new way to generate and edit any image using precise layouts. For the first time, it’s possible to create images you can touch.

[Mike Speiser @laserlikemike]

Moneyball wasn’t really about baseball. It was about discovering that everyone else was allocating capital inefficiently. Once Billy Beane proved a better model, the advantage was enormous. But the real lesson came later: when the Boston Red Sox combined the efficiency of Moneyball with vastly greater resources, they became a dynasty.

AI feels similar today. The industry is spending unprecedented amounts on compute. In image and video generation, the scale of GPU investment is staggering. When capital is abundant, efficiency often becomes an afterthought.

Two years ago, Reve started with a simple constraint: we couldn’t outspend the largest labs, so we had to outthink them. That constraint forced invention. While compute and data matter enormously, architecture still matters. How you build the system matters. Efficiency matters.

Visual generative models today use text as an intermediate representation, leveraging LLMs to plan their outputs before rendering any pixels. Natural language is expressive, but it is ambiguous — and ambiguity is the enemy of efficiency and control. Reve made a different bet. We replaced text with a better, code-like semantic representation — a layout. Layout is the reason we can compete with, and beat models trained on 10× our compute. It also opens up a whole new world of precise, non-verbal visual control.

Today, we have proved that our bet paid off. A team of 50 people has built one of the world’s best visual generative models using a fraction of the training compute of our much larger competitors.

The next chapter is even more interesting. What happens when a system designed for efficiency is given access to substantially more compute? It’s not about doing more with less. It’s about building a better machine first, then scaling it.

The broader AI race may be much earlier than most people think.

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

4/ check more details in our blog post! https://t.co/IasWufSYpS

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

Reve 2.0 is here! Ever since we moved away from the latent autoencoder, we are making yet another bet to move away from the pure text-input for image generation!

[Reve @reve]

Today, we’re launching Reve 2.0, the best 4K image model in the world.

We invented a new way to generate and edit any image using precise layouts. For the first time, it’s possible to create images you can touch.

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

3/ Moreover, instead of talking and praying the model would understand you from deep heart, layout allows everyone to touch the pixels!

[Arena.ai @arena]

Reve 2.0 has landed #2 in the Text-to-Image Arena!

Scoring 1280, this puts the latest model above Nano Banana 2, MAI-Image-2.5, and GPT-Image-1.5-High Fidelity. This is a +125pt improvement over Reve v1.5.

Congratulations to the @reve team on this major milestone!

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

Also @YGandelsman's talk!

[Yossi Gandelsman @CVPR @YGandelsman]

Come to @Taesung’s talk tmrw! You don’t want to miss it!

[Taesung Park @Taesung]

👀exciting day ahead! I am free in the afternoon at CVPR. Ping me if anyone wants to chat with me about Reve.

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

@baaadas @LumaLabsAI congrats Jiaming and good luck for the next chapter!!

[David McAllister @davidrmcall]

We developed a simple, sample-efficient online RL technique for post-training image generation models. We see it as a possible steerable alternative to CFG, driven by any scalar reward, including human preference.

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

@Yudh9662 here you go ☺️

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

I'm beyond excited about this native 4k image generation model that we've worked on for months! It feels great that the image can be directly used as a wallpaper.

[Taesung Park @Taesung]

Reve's new text-to-image model is here. Really proud of the team to rank at #3 with the big labs. To my knowledge, we are the first lab to use native pixel space diffusion without latent autoencoder at 4k (16MP) resolution for production level image generation.

[Tianwei Yin @TianweiY]

Reve V1.5 has officially landed in the Top 3 on @arena! 🥉

I’m incredibly proud of our small, crack team. We’re proving that a lean, focused group can stay right in the race against trillion-dollar giants like Google and OpenAI.

This win is built on a foundation of continuous improvements to our data & training infra, alongside architectural leaps—like native 4K generation—and novel pre- and post-training techniques.

The momentum here is unmatched. Stay tuned—image editing and new breakthroughs are coming very shortly.🚀

[Reve @reve]

Reve v1.5 is here.

Our latest image model, now with 4K resolution.

[Songwei Ge @Songwei_Ge]

@davidrmcall doggy!

[Reve @reve]

Introducing Effects. Out now in Reve.

Any filter you can imagine, at your fingertips.

[Qianqian Wang @QianqianWang5]

I'm recruiting multiple PhD students this cycle to join me at Harvard University and the Kempner Institute! My interests span vision and intelligence, including 3D/4D, active perception, memory, representation learning, and anything you're excited to explore!
Deadline: Dec 15th.