Stable Diffusion was made possible thanks to a collaboration with Stability AI and Runway and builds upon our previous work:

High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
Robin Rombach*, Andreas Blattmann*, Dominik Lorenz, Patrick Esser, Björn Ommer
CVPR '22 Oral | GitHub | arXiv | Project page

Stable Diffusion is a latent text-to-image diffusion model. Thanks to a generous compute donation from Stability AI and support from LAION, we were able to train a Latent Diffusion Model on 512x512 images from a subset of the LAION-5B database. Similar to Google's Imagen, this model uses a frozen CLIP ViT-L/14 text encoder to condition the model on text prompts. With its 860M UNet and 123M text encoder, the model is relatively lightweight and runs on a GPU with at least 10GB VRAM. See this section below and the model card.

A suitable conda environment named ldm can be created and activated with:

conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate ldm

You can also update an existing latent diffusion environment by running

conda install pytorch torchvision -c pytorch
pip install transformers==4.19.2 diffusers invisible-watermark
pip install -e .

Stable Diffusion v1 refers to a specific configuration of the model architecture that uses a downsampling-factor 8 autoencoder with an 860M UNet and CLIP ViT-L/14 text encoder for the diffusion model. The model was pretrained on 256x256 images and then finetuned on 512x512 images.

Note: Stable Diffusion v1 is a general text-to-image diffusion model and therefore mirrors biases and (mis-)conceptions that are present in its training data. Details on the training procedure and data, as well as the intended use of the model can be found in the corresponding model card.

The weights are available via the CompVis organization at Hugging Face under a license which contains specific use-based restrictions to prevent misuse and harm as informed by the model card, but otherwise remains permissive. While commercial use is permitted under the terms of the license, we do not recommend using the provided weights for services or products without additional safety mechanisms and considerations, since there are known limitations and biases of the weights, and research on safe and ethical deployment of general text-to-image models is an ongoing effort. The weights are research artifacts and should be treated as such.

The CreativeML OpenRAIL M license is an Open RAIL M license, adapted from the work that BigScience and the RAIL Initiative are jointly carrying in the area of responsible AI licensing. See also the article about the BLOOM Open RAIL license on which our license is based.

We currently provide the following checkpoints:

• sd-v1-1.ckpt: 237k steps at resolution 256x256 on laion2B-en. 194k steps at resolution 512x512 on laion-high-resolution (170M examples from LAION-5B with resolution >= 1024x1024).
• sd-v1-2.ckpt: Resumed from sd-v1-1.ckpt. 515k steps at resolution 512x512 on laion-aesthetics v2 5+ (a subset of laion2B-en with estimated aesthetics score > 5.0, and additionally filtered to images with an original size >= 512x512, and an estimated watermark probability < 0.5. The watermark estimate is from the LAION-5B metadata, the aesthetics score is estimated using the LAION-Aesthetics Predictor V2).
• sd-v1-3.ckpt: Resumed from sd-v1-2.ckpt. 195k steps at resolution 512x512 on "laion-aesthetics v2 5+" and 10% dropping of the text-conditioning to improve classifier-free guidance sampling.
• sd-v1-4.ckpt: Resumed from sd-v1-2.ckpt. 225k steps at resolution 512x512 on "laion-aesthetics v2 5+" and 10% dropping of the text-conditioning to improve classifier-free guidance sampling.

Evaluations with different classifier-free guidance scales (1.5, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0) and 50 PLMS sampling steps show the relative improvements of the checkpoints:

Stable Diffusion is a latent diffusion model conditioned on the (non-pooled) text embeddings of a CLIP ViT-L/14 text encoder. We provide a reference script for sampling, but there also exists a diffusers integration, which we expect to see more active community development.

We provide a reference sampling script, which incorporates

• a Safety Checker Module, to reduce the probability of explicit outputs,
• an invisible watermarking of the outputs, to help viewers identify the images as machine-generated.

After obtaining the stable-diffusion-v1-*-original weights, link them

mkdir -p models/ldm/stable-diffusion-v1/
ln -s <path/to/model.ckpt> models/ldm/stable-diffusion-v1/model.ckpt 

and sample with

python scripts/txt2img.py --prompt "a photograph of an astronaut riding a horse" --plms 

By default, this uses a guidance scale of --scale 7.5,