Lens: Rethinking Training Efficiency for Foundational Text-to-Image Models
Authors: name: Dong Chen, name: Fangyun Wei, name: Ziyu Wan, name: Dongdong Chen, name: Jiawei Zhang, name: Jinjing Zhao, name: Sirui Zhang, name: Yang Yue, name: Zhiyang Liang, name: Baining Guo, name: Chong Luo, name: Jianmin Bao, name: Ji Li, name: Lei Shi, name: Qinhong Yang, name: Xiuyu Wu, name: Xuelu Feng, name: Yan Lu, name: Yanchen Dong, name: Yitong Wang, name: Yunuo Chen
Organization: Microsoft

We introduce Lens, a 3.8B-parameter T2I model that achieves performance competitive with, and in several cases surpassing, state-of-the-art models with more than 6B parameters across various benchmarks, while requiring significantly less training compute. For example, Lens requires only about 19.3% of the training compute used by Z-Image. The training efficiency of Lens stems from two key strategies beyond its compact model size. First, we maximize data information density per training batch by (i) training on Lens-800M, a dataset of 800M densely captioned image-text pairs whose captions are generated by GPT-4.1 and contain approximately 109 words on average, providing richer semantic supervision than conventional short captions, and (ii) constructing each batch from images with multiple resolutions and diverse aspect ratios, thereby enlarging the effective visual coverage of each optimization step. Second, we improve convergence speed through careful architectural choices, including adopting a semantic VAE that provides better latent representations and employing a strong language encoder that accelerates optimization while enabling multilingual generalization from English-only training data. After pre-training, we apply RL with taxonomy-driven prompts (Lens-RL-8K) and structured reward rubrics to suppress artifacts and improve visual quality, a reasoner module with training-free system prompt search to better align user requests with the model, and distillation-based acceleration for 4-step inference. Through efficient training and systematic optimization, Lens generalizes to arbitrary aspect ratios from 1:2 to 2:1 and resolutions up to 1440^2, and supports prompts in several commonly used languages. Thanks to its compact size, Lens generates a 1024^2 image in 3.15 seconds on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU, while its distilled turbo version performs 4-step generation in 0.84 seconds.