Microsoft Research presents Lens, a text-to-image model with just 3.8 billion parameters that matches much larger rivals on benchmarks, at a fraction of the training cost. The secret sauce: 800 million detailed image captions generated by GPT-4.1 instead of vague web alt-text.

Code and weights are openly available under an open-source license. The article Microsoft Research's Lens proves detailed captions matter more than raw scale for training efficient image generators appeared first on The Decoder.