Lance

Lance is an open source 3B native unified multimodal model for image and video understanding, generation, and editing.

Lance is a research project and native unified multimodal model developed by ByteDance with 3B active parameters. It supports image and video understanding, generation, and editing within a single framework. The model is trained from scratch with a staged multi-task recipe and runs inference using PyTorch and vLLM-Omni. It is designed for researchers and developers working on multimodal tasks, offering capabilities across tasks like text-to-image, text-to-video, image-to-video, image editing, video editing, and visual understanding. Users can run the software locally via Python, a Gradio interface, or download model weights from Hugging Face.

Lance at a glance

Best for: Software engineer, Designer
Runs on: Web, Linux, API, CLI, self-hosted, open source
Pricing: Free
Released: May 2026
Category: AI image tool
Website: github.com/bytedance/Lance

Key features

Text-to-video generation
Text-to-image generation
Image-to-video generation
Image editing
Video editing
Image understanding and captioning
Video understanding and captioning

Use it for

Generating videos from text prompts
Editing existing images and videos
Answering questions about images and videos
Generating images from text prompts

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