SD-Turbo is a fast generative text-to-image model that can synthesize photorealistic images from a text prompt in a single network evaluation.
We release SD-Turbo as a research artifact, and to study small, distilled text-to-image models. For increased quality and prompt understanding,
we recommend SDXL-Turbo.
SD-Turbo is a distilled version of Stable Diffusion 2.1, trained for real-time synthesis.
SD-Turbo is based on a novel training method called Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD) (see the technical report), which allows sampling large-scale foundational
image diffusion models in 1 to 4 steps at high image quality.
This approach uses score distillation to leverage large-scale off-the-shelf image diffusion models as a teacher signal and combines this with an
adversarial loss to ensure high image fidelity even in the low-step regime of one or two sampling steps.
For research purposes, we recommend our generative-models Github repository (https://github.com/Stability-AI/generative-models),
which implements the most popular diffusion frameworks (both training and inference).
The charts above evaluate user preference for SD-Turbo over other single- and multi-step models.
SD-Turbo evaluated at a single step is preferred by human voters in terms of image quality and prompt following over LCM-Lora XL and LCM-Lora 1.5.
Note: For increased quality, we recommend the bigger version SDXL-Turbo.
For details on the user study, we refer to the research paper.
Uses
Direct Use
The model is intended for both non-commercial and commercial usage. Possible research areas and tasks include
Research on generative models.
Research on real-time applications of generative models.
Research on the impact of real-time generative models.
Safe deployment of models which have the potential to generate harmful content.
Probing and understanding the limitations and biases of generative models.
Generation of artworks and use in design and other artistic processes.
SD-Turbo does not make use of guidance_scale or negative_prompt, we disable it with guidance_scale=0.0.
Preferably, the model generates images of size 512x512 but higher image sizes work as well.
A single step is enough to generate high quality images.
py
1from diffusers import AutoPipelineForText2Image
2import torch
34pipe = AutoPipelineForText2Image.from_pretrained("stabilityai/sd-turbo", torch_dtype=torch.float16, variant="fp16")5pipe.to("cuda")67prompt ="A cinematic shot of a baby racoon wearing an intricate italian priest robe."8image = pipe(prompt=prompt, num_inference_steps=1, guidance_scale=0.0).images[0]
Image-to-image:
When using SD-Turbo for image-to-image generation, make sure that num_inference_steps * strength is larger or equal
to 1. The image-to-image pipeline will run for int(num_inference_steps * strength) steps, e.g. 0.5 * 2.0 = 1 step in our example
below.
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.
The model should not be used in any way that violates Stability AI's Acceptable Use Policy.
Limitations and Bias
Limitations
The quality and prompt alignment is lower than that of SDXL-Turbo.
The generated images are of a fixed resolution (512x512 pix), and the model does not achieve perfect photorealism.
The model cannot render legible text.
Faces and people in general may not be generated properly.
The autoencoding part of the model is lossy.
Recommendations
The model is intended for both non-commercial and commercial usage.
