NTH

Qwen-Image-PE: Learning Visual Design for Text-to-Image Prompt Enhancement

AuthorsZekai Zhang, Yanran Zhang, Shengming Yin, Yan Shu, Zhening Liu, Bingxuan Zhao, Chenyang Zhu, Donghao Zhou, Jiahao Li, Jiahao Wang, Jie Zhang, Kaiyuan Gao, Kun Yan, Lihan Jiang, Ningyuan Tang, Qihang Ai, Rui Song, Shuo Cao, Xiao Xu, Xiaoyue Chen, Yuxiang Chen, Zhendong Wang, Zhouyang Li, Zihao Liu, Zikai Zhou, Bo Zheng, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Chenfei Wu

AffiliationsBingxuan Zhao, Chenyang Zhu, Donghao Zhou, Jiahao Li, Jiahao Wang, Jie Zhang · Kaiyuan Gao, Kun Yan, Lihan Jiang, Ningyuan Tang, Qihang Ai, Rui Song · Shuo Cao, Xiao Xu, Xiaoyue Chen, Yuxiang Chen, Zhendong Wang, Zhouyang Li · Zihao Liu, Zikai Zhou, Bo Zheng, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Chenfei Wu

October 28, 2026 2 min read
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The one-line take

Qwen-Image-PE turns brief image requests into more carefully designed prompts to improve the images generated by text-to-image models.

Key results

7.81
Qwen-Image-PE-397B Overall gain

Qwen-Image-Bench points above original requests, increasing Overall from 54.36 to 62.17.

60.28
Qwen-Image-PE-9B Overall

Qwen-Image-Bench score, above GPT-5.5 at 60.10 among evaluated prompt enhancers.

59.1%
GDR human agreement

Agreement with human design preferences, compared with 50.9% for pointwise reward.

12.66
Information-density scaling gain

Qwen-Image-Bench Overall points gained, from 44.65 to 57.31.

3.07
HunyuanImage-2.1 transfer advantage

Overall points by which Qwen-Image-PE-397B exceeds the native prompt enhancer.

2.74
FLUX 3 Image Klein transfer advantage

Overall points by which Qwen-Image-397B exceeds the native prompt enhancer.

What the paper found

Qwen-Image-PE treats prompt enhancement as visual design: it expands brief requests into coherent instructions for lighting, composition, layout, and detail while preserving user intent. Its two-stage method first uses Caption-Based Reverse Distillation to learn design choices from dense captions of well-designed images, then applies Groupwise Design Reward with GRPO to compare candidate images for the same request and refine the prompts. On Qwen-Image-Bench, Qwen-Image-PE-397B lifts the Overall score from 54.36 to 62.17, a 7.81-point gain; the 9B model scores 60.28, ahead of evaluated prompt-enhancement baselines including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 at 60.10 and Google’s Gemini-3.1-Pro. Groupwise reward rankings agree with human design preferences 59.1% of the time, versus 50.9% for pointwise scoring. The paper also finds that richer prompt information is crucial: Overall rises from 44.65 to 57.31 across its information-density experiment, a 12.66-point improvement. The enhancer transfers to four additional image generators and beats native prompt enhancers on HunyuanImage-2.1 and FLUX 3 Image Klein, exceeding them by 3.07 and 2.74 points, respectively.

Original abstract

Learning visual design is essential for prompt enhancement (PE) to turn underspecified user requests into coherent visual specifications for text-to-image (T2I) generation. Existing methods preserve user intent and improve overall visual appeal, with less explicit emphasis on fine-grained design dimensions. To address this gap, we introduce Qwen-Image-PE, which learns visual design through two-stage training. Supervised fine-tuning with Caption-Based Reverse Distillation (CRD) uses dense captions of well-designed images as design supervision. Reinforcement learning with Groupwise Design Reward (GDR) jointly compares all candidate images for the same request to refine lighting, composition, layout, and detail. On Qwen-Image-Bench with Qwen-Image-2.1, Qwen-Image-PE-397B improves over original requests by 7.81 points, while Qwen-Image-PE-9B outperforms all evaluated PE baselines. Further evaluations show gains in visual design, aesthetics, image quality, and human preference. We find that PE scales along three axes: training data, model size, and information density, with sufficient information density as a prerequisite for effective enhancement. Moreover, we demonstrate that Qwen-Image-PE generalizes to four additional T2I backbones, even surpassing native prompt enhancers on HunyuanImage-2.1 and FLUX 3 Image Klein. We release Qwen-Image-PE-9B at https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1-PE-T2I.

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