PixArt-α

PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis is Junsong Chen, Jincheng Yu, Chongjian Ge, Lewei Yao, Enze Xie, Yue Wu, Zhongdao Wang, James Kwok, Ping Luo, Huchuan Lu, and Zhenguo Li.

The abstract from the paper is:

The most advanced text-to-image (T2I) models require significant training costs (e.g., millions of GPU hours), seriously hindering the fundamental innovation for the AIGC community while increasing CO2 emissions. This paper introduces PIXART-α, a Transformer-based T2I diffusion model whose image generation quality is competitive with state-of-the-art image generators (e.g., Imagen, SDXL, and even Midjourney), reaching near-commercial application standards. Additionally, it supports high-resolution image synthesis up to 1024px resolution with low training cost, as shown in Figure 1 and 2. To achieve this goal, three core designs are proposed: (1) Training strategy decomposition: We devise three distinct training steps that separately optimize pixel dependency, text-image alignment, and image aesthetic quality; (2) Efficient T2I Transformer: We incorporate cross-attention modules into Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to inject text conditions and streamline the computation-intensive class-condition branch; (3) High-informative data: We emphasize the significance of concept density in text-image pairs and leverage a large Vision-Language model to auto-label dense pseudo-captions to assist text-image alignment learning. As a result, PIXART-α's training speed markedly surpasses existing large-scale T2I models, e.g., 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%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PIXART-α excels in image quality, artistry, and semantic control. We hope PIXART-α will provide new insights to the AIGC community and startups to accelerate building their own high-quality yet low-cost generative models from scratch.

You can find the original codebase at PixArt-alpha/PixArt-alpha and all the available checkpoints at PixArt-alpha.

Some notes about this pipeline:

It uses a Transformer backbone (instead of a UNet) for denoising. As such it has a similar architecture as DiT.
It was trained using text conditions computed from T5. This aspect makes the pipeline better at following complex text prompts with intricate details.
It is good at producing high-resolution images at different aspect ratios. To get the best results, the authors recommend some size brackets which can be found here.
It rivals the quality of state-of-the-art text-to-image generation systems (as of this writing) such as Stable Diffusion XL, Imagen, and DALL-E 2, while being more efficient than them.

Make sure to check out the Schedulers guide to learn how to explore the tradeoff between scheduler speed and quality, and see the reuse components across pipelines section to learn how to efficiently load the same components into multiple pipelines.

PixArtAlphaPipeline

[[autodoc]] PixArtAlphaPipeline - all - call