On June 29, 2025, the Alibaba International AI team officially launched the new multimodal large model **Ovis-U1**, marking another major breakthrough in the field of multimodal artificial intelligence. As the latest masterpiece of the Ovis series, Ovis-U1 integrates multimodal understanding, image generation, and image editing capabilities, demonstrating powerful cross-modal processing abilities, and offering new possibilities for developers, researchers, and industry applications. The following is a detailed report from AIbase on Ovis-U1.

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Ovis-U1: A Three-in-One Multimodal Unified Framework

Ovis-U1 is a 3-billion parameter model developed by the Alibaba International AI team based on the Ovis series architecture, which for the first time achieves unification of multimodal understanding, text-to-image generation, and image editing. According to AIbase, the model adopts an innovative architecture design, efficiently aligning visual and textual embeddings through three core components: a visual tokenizer, a visual embedding table, and a large language model (LLM). This structured alignment approach overcomes the limitations of traditional multimodal models in cross-modal transformation, significantly enhancing the model's performance in complex scenarios.

Ovis-U1 can process various input formats such as text and images, and it demonstrates excellent performance in tasks such as mathematical reasoning, object recognition, text extraction, and video understanding. For example, it can not only accurately identify objects or handwritten text in images but also generate high-quality images or perform precise edits on existing images according to user instructions. This "three-in-one" capability makes it highly promising for application in fields such as education, e-commerce, healthcare, and autonomous driving.

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Technical Highlights: Efficient Training and Open-Source Sharing

The development of Ovis-U1 relies on advanced training strategies and diverse datasets. According to official information, the model is built using technologies such as Python 3.10, Torch 2.4.0, and Transformers 4.51.3. During the training process, DeepSpeed 0.15.4 optimization was adopted to ensure efficiency and stability. In addition, Ovis-U1 continues the open-source tradition of the Ovis series, using the Apache 2.0 license. The code, model weights, and training data are publicly available on Hugging Face and GitHub, allowing developers to quickly reproduce and deploy the model with simple environmental configuration.

AIbase noticed that Ovis-U1 introduced a compliance checking algorithm during training, ensuring that the model's outputs comply with ethical and legal requirements. This transparent development approach not only reflects Alibaba's contribution to the open-source community but also provides a convenient tool for global developers to explore multimodal AI.

Ovis-U1's multimodal capabilities make it perform well in practical applications. For instance, in the e-commerce sector, Ovis-U1 can analyze product images to generate multilingual descriptions or edit product display images according to user needs, enhancing consumer experience. In educational scenarios, it can recognize handwritten mathematical formulas and provide detailed solutions, assisting students in their learning. Additionally, Ovis-U1 supports generating recipes and analyzing video content, providing innovative solutions for smart homes and content creation.

AIbase believes that the release of Ovis-U1 not only solidifies Alibaba's leading position in the field of multimodal AI but also promotes the popularization and advancement of global AI technology through its open-source model. In the future, Ovis-U1 is expected to be applied in more industry scenarios, becoming an intelligent bridge connecting vision, language, and decision-making.

Since the release of Ovis-U1, there have been many discussions on social media. Many developers have praised the model's versatility and open-source features, considering it a low-barrier AI solution for small and medium-sized enterprises and individual developers. AIbase expects that with the widespread application of Ovis-U1, more innovative use cases will emerge within the community.

Project: (https://huggingface.co/AIDC-AI/Ovis-U1-3B)