What is Bagel?
Developing cutting-edge AI applications often requires powerful models capable of understanding and generating both text and images. While proprietary systems offer strong capabilities, the flexibility and transparency of open-source solutions are invaluable for research, customization, and deployment. BAGEL, an open-source Unified Multimodal Model from ByteDance-Seed, provides this foundation. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, BAGEL offers advanced image and text understanding, generation, editing, and navigation features, presenting a robust alternative comparable in functionality to leading proprietary models like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0. It's designed to be fine-tuned, distilled, and deployed wherever your projects take you.
Key Features
Dive into the core capabilities that make BAGEL a versatile tool for multimodal AI development:
🗨️ Unified Chat & Understanding: Built upon large language models, BAGEL handles mixed image and text inputs and outputs seamlessly, enabling sophisticated reasoning and natural conversation about visual content.
🖼️ High-Fidelity Generation: Pre-trained on extensive interleaved video and web data, the model generates photorealistic images and interleaved image-text content. Its multimodal Chain-of-Thought process allows for more coherent and precise visual outputs.
✂️ Intelligent Image Editing: Leveraging video pre-training, BAGEL effectively preserves visual identities and fine details while supporting complex edits. Its strong reasoning allows it to go beyond basic manipulations.
🎨 Flexible Style Transfer: With a deep grasp of visual styles, BAGEL can transform images, applying different artistic styles or even shifting them into entirely new visual domains with minimal effort.
🌍 World Navigation: By learning from real-world video data, the model acquires navigation knowledge, enabling it to understand and execute instructions for moving within diverse environments, including simulated or artistic spaces.
🧩 Compositional Abilities: Integrating knowledge from various data sources (video, web, language), BAGEL supports reasoning, physical dynamics modeling, future frame prediction, and smooth, multi-turn multimodal conversations.
🧠 Integrated Thinking Mode: BAGEL incorporates a unique thinking process that refines prompts internally before generation or editing. This leads to outputs with richer context, accurate details, and logical consistency, transforming brief descriptions into detailed results.
🔧 Open-Source Architecture: Based on a Mixture-of-Transformer-Experts (MoT) architecture with dual encoders for pixel and semantic features, BAGEL is designed for scalability and efficient learning from diverse data. Its open nature allows for deep customization and integration.
Use Cases
Explore how BAGEL can be applied in your AI projects:
Building Advanced Multimodal Chatbots: Integrate BAGEL's unified chat and understanding capabilities into applications that require agents to converse naturally about images, process visual queries, and generate descriptive or creative text responses based on visual input.
Developing Intelligent Image Editing Tools: Leverage BAGEL's editing and style transfer features to create applications that allow users to perform complex, instruction-based image manipulations, change artistic styles, or even modify elements within images based on natural language commands.
Creating AI Agents for Simulated or Robotic Environments: Utilize BAGEL's navigation and compositional reasoning to develop agents capable of understanding spatial relationships, predicting outcomes of actions, and executing navigation tasks in simulated environments (like games or virtual worlds) or for potential applications in robotics.
Conclusion
BAGEL provides a powerful, flexible, and open foundation for pushing the boundaries of multimodal AI. Its comprehensive understanding, generation, editing, and navigation capabilities, backed by a robust architecture and competitive benchmark performance, make it a compelling choice for researchers and developers seeking an open-source alternative to proprietary systems. Explore BAGEL to build the next generation of AI applications.




