Nanosaur is a 250M parameter text-to-image model for illustrations. It consists of two trained components:
PS-VAE: A VAE that compresses DINOv3's representation while retaining the semantic content
DeCo: A diffusion transformer with a wide MLP head per patch similar to DDT
This model was trained in 42 hours on 1 GPU from scratch, setting a new standard for compute efficiency in T2I illustration training.
This model is intended for research purposes. It is not a general purpose T2I model. It is not a finetune of an existing model. Do not expect visual quality to match corporate models.
Prompt format: tags or natural language
This repo includes a gradio GUI for image generation, a tech report, and training scripts for the VAE and for the diffusion model
Included Checkpoints
Checkpoint
Path
Parameters
Description
PS-VAE
vae_checkpoint.pt
150M
VAE with DINOv3 encoder, 96-channel latent space, 16x spatial compression
DeCo
diffusion_model_checkpoint.pth
250M
Diffusion transformer with SPRINT and x-prediction
Text Encoder: Google Gemma 3 270M (downloaded from Hugging Face; you may need to agree to their terms to access the repo)