🚀 🐱 Pixart-α Model Card
Pixart-α is a diffusion-transformer-based text-to-image generative model that can directly generate 1024px images from text prompts within a single sampling process.
✨ Features
Model

Pixart-α consists of pure transformer blocks for latent diffusion. It can directly generate 1024px images from text prompts within a single sampling process.
Source code is available at https://github.com/PixArt-alpha/PixArt-alpha.
Model Description
Model Sources
For research purposes, we recommend our generative-models
Github repository (https://github.com/PixArt-alpha/PixArt-alpha), which is more suitable for both training and inference and for which most advanced diffusion sampler like SA-Solver will be added over time. Hugging Face provides free Pixart-α inference.
- Repository: https://github.com/PixArt-alpha/PixArt-alpha
- Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/PixArt-alpha/PixArt-alpha
Why PixArt-α?
Training Efficiency
PixArt-α only takes 10.8% of Stable Diffusion v1.5's training time (675 vs. 6,250 A100 GPU days), saving nearly $300,000 ($26,000 vs. $320,000) and reducing 90% CO2 emissions. Moreover, compared with a larger SOTA model, RAPHAEL, our training cost is merely 1%.

Method |
Type |
#Params |
#Images |
A100 GPU days |
DALL·E |
Diff |
12.0B |
1.54B |
|
GLIDE |
Diff |
5.0B |
5.94B |
|
LDM |
Diff |
1.4B |
0.27B |
|
DALL·E 2 |
Diff |
6.5B |
5.63B |
41.66 |
SDv1.5 |
Diff |
0.9B |
3.16B |
6,250 |
GigaGAN |
GAN |
0.9B |
0.98B |
4,783 |
Imagen |
Diff |
3.0B |
15.36B |
7,132 |
RAPHAEL |
Diff |
3.0B |
5.0B |
60,000 |
PixArt-α |
Diff |
0.6B |
0.025B |
675 |
Evaluation
The chart above evaluates user preference for Pixart-α over SDXL 0.9, Stable Diffusion 2, DALLE-2 and DeepFloyd. The Pixart-α base model performs comparable or even better than the existing state-of-the-art models.
📦 Installation
🧨 Diffusers
Make sure to upgrade diffusers to >= 0.22.0:
pip install -U diffusers --upgrade
In addition make sure to install transformers
, safetensors
, sentencepiece
, and accelerate
:
pip install transformers accelerate safetensors
💻 Usage Examples
Basic Usage
from diffusers import PixArtAlphaPipeline
import torch
pipe = PixArtAlphaPipeline.from_pretrained("PixArt-alpha/PixArt-XL-2-512x512", torch_dtype=torch.float16)
pipe = pipe.to("cuda")
prompt = "An astronaut riding a green horse"
images = pipe(prompt=prompt).images[0]
Advanced Usage
When using torch >= 2.0
, you can improve the inference speed by 20-30% with torch.compile. Simple wrap the unet with torch compile before running the pipeline:
pipe.transformer = torch.compile(pipe.transformer, mode="reduce-overhead", fullgraph=True)
If you are limited by GPU VRAM, you can enable cpu offloading by calling pipe.enable_model_cpu_offload
instead of .to("cuda")
:
- pipe.to("cuda")
+ pipe.enable_model_cpu_offload()
For more information on how to use Pixart-α with diffusers
, please have a look at the Pixart-α Docs.
Free Google Colab
You can use Google Colab to generate images from PixArt-α free of charge. Click here to try.
📚 Documentation
Uses
Direct Use
The model is intended for research purposes only. Possible research areas and tasks include:
- Generation of artworks and use in design and other artistic processes.
- Applications in educational or creative tools.
- Research on generative models.
- Safe deployment of models which have the potential to generate harmful content.
- Probing and understanding the limitations and biases of generative models.
Excluded uses are described below.
Out-of-Scope Use
The model was not trained to be factual or true representations of people or events, and therefore using the model to generate such content is out-of-scope for the abilities of this model.
Limitations and Bias
Limitations
- The model does not achieve perfect photorealism.
- The model cannot render legible text.
- The model struggles with more difficult tasks which involve compositionality, such as rendering an image corresponding to “A red cube on top of a blue sphere”.
- Fingers, etc. in general may not be generated properly.
- The autoencoding part of the model is lossy.
Bias
While the capabilities of image generation models are impressive, they can also reinforce or exacerbate social biases.
📄 License
The model is under the CreativeML Open RAIL++-M License.