Model reference · open weights

PixArt-XL-2-512x512

Image PixArt-alpha Text→image 1 build Open weights 5k dl/mo

PixArt-XL-2-512x512 is an open-weight image model from PixArt-alpha. PixArt-XL-2-512x512 (FP32) weighs 6.1 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • PixArt-XL-2-512x512 is a 611M parameter text-to-image generative model developed by PixArt-alpha.
  • It uses a Diffusion-Transformer architecture with a T5 text encoder and VAE to generate images from text prompts.
  • The model is released under the CreativeML Open RAIL++-M license.

Summary of the PixArt-alpha/PixArt-XL-2-512x512 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byPixArt-alpha
Released2023-11-04
Parameters611M
VRAM6.1 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for PixArt-XL-2-512x512 (FP32)

6.1 GBweights, file size
4.8 GBbiggest part
5.0 GBworking memory, one 1024² image
537 MBruntime overhead
CardOne imageMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBtight11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What PixArt-alpha says about PixArt-XL-2-512x512

Read the model card

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%.

MethodType#Params#ImagesA100 GPU days
DALL·EDiff12.0B1.54B
GLIDEDiff5.0B5.94B
LDMDiff1.4B0.27B
DALL·E 2Diff6.5B5.63B41,66
SDv1.5Diff0.9B3.16B6,250
GigaGANGAN0.9B0.98B4,783
ImagenDiff3.0B15.36B7,132
RAPHAELDiff3.0B5.0B60,000
PixArt-αDiff0.6B0.025B675

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.

🧨 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

To just use the base model, you can run:

from diffusers import PixArtAlphaPipeline
import torch

pipe = PixArtAlphaPipeline.from_pretrained("PixArt-alpha/PixArt-XL-2-512x512", torch_dtype=torch.float16)
pipe = pipe.to("cuda")

# if using torch < 2.0
# pipe.enable_xformers_memory_efficient_attention()

prompt = "An astronaut riding a green horse"
images = pipe(prompt=prompt).images[0]

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

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.

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

Running it yourself

Run it on a rented GPU

Rent a machine by the hour. Runs as it is with diffusers, on the machine, in Python.

# on your rented machine: pip install diffusers transformers accelerate
import torch
from diffusers import DiffusionPipeline

pipe = DiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("PixArt-alpha/PixArt-XL-2-512x512", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16).to("cuda")
image = pipe(prompt="a red bicycle on a cobbled street").images[0]
image.save("/workspace/out.png")
Renting a GPU: connect, tunnels, Python
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