Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image) is Google's fastest, most cost-efficient Gemini image model, built for high-velocity developer pipelines and rapid-fire visual exploration. It delivers text-to-image generation...
Model updates refreshed3d agoJul 1, 2026news + changelog
Recent launch, pricing, benchmark, and API signals linked to this model or its provider.
LaunchesGoogle3d ago
As generative AI tools continue to evolve, we believe it's more important than ever to know what's AI-generated and what isn't. That’s why @GoogleDeepMind launched SynthID in 2023—a technology that ad
As generative AI tools continue to evolve, we believe it's more important than ever to know what's AI-generated and what isn't. That’s why @GoogleDeepMind launched SynthID in 2023—a technology that adds a hidden digital watermark to AI content. Here’s a summary of SynthID’s https://t.co/6ZJCsdwuHK
We’re shipping 2 major releases: 🔘 Nano Banana 2 Lite: our fastest and cheapest Gemini Image model 🔘 Gemini Omni Flash: now available via the Gemini API and in @GoogleAIStudio to help developers gen
We’re shipping 2 major releases: 🔘 Nano Banana 2 Lite: our fastest and cheapest Gemini Image model 🔘 Gemini Omni Flash: now available via the Gemini API and in @GoogleAIStudio to help developers generate and edit high-quality videos. https://t.co/fqB2sA5Xyl
Google DeepMind 🤝 @A24 We’re launching a research partnership with A24 to ensure the tools of the future are shaped by the creators who use them. Find out more → https://t.co/KN3HdGVjGS https://t.co/
Google DeepMind 🤝 @A24 We’re launching a research partnership with A24 to ensure the tools of the future are shaped by the creators who use them. Find out more → https://t.co/KN3HdGVjGS https://t.co/IUD7rkcRQS
We’re shipping two major updates to streamline your creative workflow, allowing you to generate high-speed images with one model and then instantly animate them with the other—all at a fraction of the
We’re shipping two major updates to streamline your creative workflow, allowing you to generate high-speed images with one model and then instantly animate them with the other—all at a fraction of the cost 🍌⚡️ 1️⃣ Introducing Nano Banana 2 Lite: Our fastest and most https://t.co/Cnr2aVxahs
Representation Distribution Matching for One-Step Visual Generation
We elucidate the design space of Representation Distribution Matching (RDM), our name for the paradigm that trains a one-step image generator by matching generated and reference feature distributions under frozen pretrained encoders. We identify two design axes, how the distributions are compared and the representations they are compared in, and controlled studies along them yield three findings. First, the classical MMD, which could not train convincing generators a decade ago, becomes a strong and scalable objective once estimated right. Second, the generated batch is then the operative variable, with an optimum above 2048, far beyond customary batch sizes. Third, any single representation can be gamed, driven below the real score while images stay visibly fake, so we match against a balanced battery of encoders and evaluate with SW_r14, a Sliced-Wasserstein distance over 14 encoders that is independent of the training loss and resists gaming. Combining the preferred choices yields improved RDM (iRDM): it sets the one-step state of the art on ImageNet at SW_r14 1.30, corroborated by PickScore, a human-preference proxy our objective never optimizes, which prefers it over the prior best one-step generator on 71.2% of matched samples. The same recipe post-trains the four-step FLUX.2 [klein] into a one-step generator, surpassing the four-step version on GenEval, 0.826 to 0.794, and on PickScore, 22.76 to 22.58, in 90 H200 GPU-hours. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/rdm/.
As generative AI tools continue to evolve, we believe it's more important than ever to know what's AI-generated and what isn't. That’s why @GoogleDeepMind launched SynthID in 2023—a technology that ad
As generative AI tools continue to evolve, we believe it's more important than ever to know what's AI-generated and what isn't. That’s why @GoogleDeepMind launched SynthID in 2023—a technology that adds a hidden digital watermark to AI content. Here’s a summary of SynthID’s https://t.co/6ZJCsdwuHK
We’re shipping two major updates to streamline your creative workflow, allowing you to generate high-speed images with one model and then instantly animate them with the other—all at a fraction of the
We’re shipping two major updates to streamline your creative workflow, allowing you to generate high-speed images with one model and then instantly animate them with the other—all at a fraction of the cost 🍌⚡️ 1️⃣ Introducing Nano Banana 2 Lite: Our fastest and most https://t.co/Cnr2aVxahs
We’re shipping 2 major releases: 🔘 Nano Banana 2 Lite: our fastest and cheapest Gemini Image model 🔘 Gemini Omni Flash: now available via the Gemini API and in @GoogleAIStudio to help developers gen
We’re shipping 2 major releases: 🔘 Nano Banana 2 Lite: our fastest and cheapest Gemini Image model 🔘 Gemini Omni Flash: now available via the Gemini API and in @GoogleAIStudio to help developers generate and edit high-quality videos. https://t.co/fqB2sA5Xyl
Google DeepMind 🤝 @A24 We’re launching a research partnership with A24 to ensure the tools of the future are shaped by the creators who use them. Find out more → https://t.co/KN3HdGVjGS https://t.co/
Google DeepMind 🤝 @A24 We’re launching a research partnership with A24 to ensure the tools of the future are shaped by the creators who use them. Find out more → https://t.co/KN3HdGVjGS https://t.co/IUD7rkcRQS
Representation Distribution Matching for One-Step Visual Generation
We elucidate the design space of Representation Distribution Matching (RDM), our name for the paradigm that trains a one-step image generator by matching generated and reference feature distributions under frozen pretrained encoders. We identify two design axes, how the distributions are compared and the representations they are compared in, and controlled studies along them yield three findings. First, the classical MMD, which could not train convincing generators a decade ago, becomes a strong and scalable objective once estimated right. Second, the generated batch is then the operative variable, with an optimum above 2048, far beyond customary batch sizes. Third, any single representation can be gamed, driven below the real score while images stay visibly fake, so we match against a balanced battery of encoders and evaluate with SW_r14, a Sliced-Wasserstein distance over 14 encoders that is independent of the training loss and resists gaming. Combining the preferred choices yields improved RDM (iRDM): it sets the one-step state of the art on ImageNet at SW_r14 1.30, corroborated by PickScore, a human-preference proxy our objective never optimizes, which prefers it over the prior best one-step generator on 71.2% of matched samples. The same recipe post-trains the four-step FLUX.2 [klein] into a one-step generator, surpassing the four-step version on GenEval, 0.826 to 0.794, and on PickScore, 22.76 to 22.58, in 90 H200 GPU-hours. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/rdm/.
From SRA to Self-Flow: Data Augmentation or Self-Supervision?
Representation alignment has become an effective way to accelerate diffusion transformer training and improve generation quality. Recent self-alignment methods, such as SRA and Self-Flow, further remove the dependency on external pretrained encoders by constructing alignment within the diffusion model itself. However, the mechanism behind the improvement from SRA to Self-Flow, dual-time scheduling, remains under-examined: Self-Flow attributes its gain to interactions between tokens at different noise levels, where cleaner tokens help infer noisier ones. In this work, we revisit this explanation and ask whether the gain instead comes from data augmentation along the noise dimension. To disentangle these factors, we introduce Attention Separation, which preserves the same dual-timestep input as Self-Flow while blocking attention between tokens assigned to different noise levels. Surprisingly, removing such interaction does not degrade performance and can even improve it, suggesting that the improvement from SRA to Self-Flow mainly comes from data augmentation. Furthermore,We show that Attention Separation itself provides an augmentation effect by splitting a single image into multiple effective training parts to expand the training data. Based on these observations, we combine self-representation alignment with dual-timestep and attention-separation augmentation, and demonstrate the effectiveness of this design on ImageNet.
Are Performance-Optimization Benchmarks Reliably Measuring Coding Agents?
Repository-level performance-optimization benchmarks such as GSO, SWE-Perf and SWE-fficiency evaluate coding agents by applying patches to real repositories and comparing runtime against unoptimized baselines and official reference patches. Their leaderboard scores are increasingly used as evidence of coding-agent progress, but those scores can conflate runtime instability, benchmark-specific scoring rules, and how many tasks are already solved by at least one public submission. We audit these issues across the three benchmarks. First, we replay the official reference patches for 740 code optimization tasks across four common types of Google Cloud machines. Most benchmark tasks can be replayed, but their reference patches satisfy the original benchmark validity rules in every cross-machine replay for only 39/102 GSO tasks, 11/140 SWE-Perf tasks, and 411/498 SWE-fficiency tasks; SWE-Perf is especially fragile because many reference patches produce close-to-zero runtime changes. Second, we show that public submission rankings depend strongly on the benchmark scoring rule. Among eight public submissions shared by GSO and SWE-fficiency, the official rankings disagree on 9 of 28 pairwise submission comparisons, and SWE-fficiency's leaderboard scoring rule assigns the worst ten tasks overly high score weights of 58.5%-82.8%. Third, looking across 10 public submissions for each task, we find that at least one submission matches or beats the reference patch on 85.3% (384/450) of replay-valid GSO and SWE-fficiency tasks, and beats the unoptimized base code on 99.8% (449/450). Our study complements leaderboard scores by identifying tasks with more reliable performance signals, quantifying per-task score contributions, and exposing the remaining performance gaps that are hidden by aggregate rankings.
GEAR: Guided End-to-End AutoRegression for Image Synthesis
Visual generative models are typically trained in two stages. A tokenizer is first trained for reconstruction and then frozen, after which a generator is trained on its discrete indices or continuous latents. This decoupling leaves the tokenizer unaware of what the generator finds easy to model. We present GEAR (Guided End-to-end AutoRegression), which trains a vector-quantized (VQ) tokenizer and an autoregressive (AR) generator jointly and end-to-end, guided by representation alignment. The key obstacle is that the VQ index fed to the AR model is non-differentiable, so gradients cannot reach the tokenizer, and a straight-through estimator collapses. GEAR resolves this with a dual read-out of the codebook assignment. A hard, one-hot branch trains the AR with next-token prediction, while a differentiable soft branch carries a representation-alignment loss that flows back to guide only the tokenizer. The AR model thereby steers its tokenizer toward an index distribution it can predict more easily. This shifts the alignment burden from the tokenizer to the AR: the tokenizer's own features become less DINOv2-like while the AR's become more so, the opposite of diffusion-side recipes that make the latent itself semantic. GEAR speeds up ImageNet gFID convergence by up to 10x relative to the strong LlamaGen-REPA baseline, learns markedly better patch-level and spatially-coherent features, and generalizes across quantizers (VQVAE, LFQ, IBQ) and to text-to-image generation.
Towards Automating Scientific Review with Google's Paper Assistant Tool
Artificial intelligence is driving a revolution in scientific discovery, accelerating everything from hypothesis generation to mathematical theorem proving. However, this rapid acceleration is creating a systemic challenge: traditional human peer review cannot scale to match the influx of AI-assisted science. Ultimately, to resolve this tension, we must also deploy AI to accelerate the verification and review process itself. To frame the discussion around this transition, we propose a taxonomy consisting of four progressive levels of AI-human collaboration in scientific evaluation, and discuss various trade-offs involved with each.
As a step toward this future, we introduce the Paper Assistant Tool (PAT), an agentic AI framework built for deep scientific review and verification. PAT ingests full scientific manuscripts and produces a comprehensive evaluation, checking theoretical results, validating experiments, suggesting improvements, and identifying potential flaws. By utilizing inference scaling techniques, PAT is able to identify deeper issues than a single model call alone, achieving a 34% improvement over zero-shot recall on mathematical errors in the SPOT benchmark. Pilot deployments of PAT as a pre-submission tool for authors at two major Computer Science conferences -- STOC and ICML -- demonstrate its ability to identify critical errors and suggest substantive improvements to research papers. By catching errors early, PAT eases the cognitive burden placed on referees, while preserving their control over the outcomes of the review process.
Parallel Rollout Approximation for Pixel-Space Autoregressive Image Generation
Pixel-space continuous-token autoregressive (AR) generation directly models images as sequences of raw pixel patches, avoiding discrete tokenization or a separately pretrained tokenizer. However, it faces coupled challenges: high-dimensional patch generation causes large single-step errors, and teacher-forced training creates a train--inference gap that makes these errors accumulate across AR steps. Existing fixes such as x-prediction and input noise injection only partially mitigate these issues. Exact rollout training better matches inference-time conditions, but is impractical due to prohibitively slow sequential sampling. We propose Parallel Rollout Approximation (PRA), a scalable framework that addresses both challenges jointly. PRA generates low-dimensional intermediate states instead of high-dimensional pixel patches, then maps them back to pixel-space tokens with a pixel decoder, preserving a pixel-in, pixel-out AR interface. It also constructs inference-like pixel inputs through the same intermediate-state-to-pixel path used at inference, independently across positions, approximating the pixel-feedback interface encountered during inference-time rollout while retaining parallel teacher-forced training. On class-conditional ImageNet-1K generation at 256times256 resolution, PRA-S with 135M parameters achieves an FID of 2.58, surpassing the previous billion-scale pixel-space AR result of 3.60. Scaling to PRA-L with 511M parameters further improves FID to 1.94, establishing a new state of the art among pixel-space AR models. Beyond generation, PRA achieves higher ImageNet classification probing accuracy than other AR and diffusion baselines, suggesting its potential for unified pixel-space image generation and understanding.
MIMFlow: Integrating Masked Image Modeling with Normalizing Flows for End-to-End Image Generation
Normalizing Flows (NFs) are powerful generative models capable of exact density estimation and sampling. However, their strict invertibility often forces the model to exhaust its capacity on low-level pixel details, hindering the capture of high-level semantic structures. While Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has excelled in representation learning, its integration into generative pipelines has remained largely modular and disjointed. In this paper, we propose MIMFlow, a unified end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes latent semantics, pixel reconstruction, and generative flow. By employing a VAE encoder to infer semantic latent from masked images, MIMFlow achieves a principled decoupling of the generative task: the Normalizing Flow focuses on modeling a simplified, low-frequency semantic manifold, while a specialized decoder handles high-frequency synthesis. This design effectively resolves the inherent capacity bottleneck of NFs, allowing the model to prioritize global structural coherence over redundant noise. Empirical results on ImageNet 256times256 show that MIMFlow-L reaches 71.3\% linear probing accuracy and an FID of 2.50. Despite using only 128 tokens (50\% fewer than standard models), it yields a 32.8\% performance gain over similar-scale NF baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MIMFlow.
DiffusionBench: On Holistic Evaluation of Diffusion Transformers
Diffusion transformer (DiT) research on image generation has converged to a single evaluation setup: class-conditional generation on ImageNet. While methods improve the FID and related metrics, it is increasingly unclear whether they reflect real progress in generative modeling. The natural alternative, i.e., text-to-image (T2I) generation, is perceived as too costly or inconvenient to train and evaluate and is often skipped. We argue that this perception no longer holds. We introduce NanoGen, a unified DiT training and evaluation framework. NanoGen matches state-of-the-art DiT baselines on ImageNet and, with 12 lines of configuration change, also trains competitive text-to-image models. It currently supports RAE, VAE, pixel-space, and MeanFlow diffusion methods under both ImageNet and T2I setups. Under NanoGen, training T2I requires comparable compute to ImageNet. After training 21 latent diffusion models with NanoGen, we observe that method ranking shows no strong correlation between ImageNet and T2I generation: Pearson correlation is between -0.377 and -0.580 across three metrics. This suggests that a method which improves class-conditional ImageNet FID may show no corresponding improvement on T2I, clearly indicating the necessity of evaluating DiTs on both tasks. To this end, we summarize ImageNet and text-to-image results, which yields DiffusionBench, a holistic benchmark for DiT research. We recommend reporting DiffusionBench in place of ImageNet alone: methods that improve DiffusionBench are more likely to reflect broader progress.
