Model reference · open weights

sdxl

Available as managed deployment Licence fee Image unsloth Text→image 1 variants 1k dl/mo

sdxl is an open-weight image model from unsloth. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.

Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.

What it is

Released byunsloth
TypeImage models
TaskText→image
Parameters (lead)2.6B
Runs withdiffusers
Released2026-08-06
Popularity1k downloads / month
LicenceCommercial licence needed

About

What sdxl is

Mirror of stabilityai/sdxl-turbo, republished by Unsloth. The weights are unmodified. See NOTICE and the licence file in this repo for the terms, which are the upstream terms and are unchanged.

Read the full model card

SDXL-Turbo Model Card

SDXL-Turbo is a fast generative text-to-image model that can synthesize photorealistic images from a text prompt in a single network evaluation. A real-time demo is available here: http://clipdrop.co/stable-diffusion-turbo

Please note: For commercial use, please refer to https://stability.ai/license.

Model Details

Model Description

SDXL-Turbo is a distilled version of SDXL 1.0, trained for real-time synthesis. SDXL-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.

  • Developed by: Stability AI
  • Funded by: Stability AI
  • Model type: Generative text-to-image model
  • Finetuned from model: SDXL 1.0 Base

Model Sources

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).

  • Repository: https://github.com/Stability-AI/generative-models
  • Paper: https://stability.ai/research/adversarial-diffusion-distillation
  • Demo: http://clipdrop.co/stable-diffusion-turbo

Evaluation

The charts above evaluate user preference for SDXL-Turbo over other single- and multi-step models. SDXL-Turbo evaluated at a single step is preferred by human voters in terms of image quality and prompt following over LCM-XL evaluated at four (or fewer) steps. In addition, we see that using four steps for SDXL-Turbo further improves performance. 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. You can use this model for non-commercial or research purposes under this license. 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.
  • Applications in educational or creative tools.

For commercial use, please refer to https://stability.ai/membership.

Excluded uses are described below.

Diffusers

pip install diffusers transformers accelerate --upgrade
  • Text-to-image:

SDXL-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.

from diffusers import AutoPipelineForText2Image
import torch

pipe = AutoPipelineForText2Image.from_pretrained("stabilityai/sdxl-turbo", torch_dtype=torch.float16, variant="fp16")
pipe.to("cuda")

prompt = "A cinematic shot of a baby racoon wearing an intricate italian priest robe."

image = pipe(prompt=prompt, num_inference_steps=1, guidance_scale=0.0).images[0]
  • Image-to-image:

When using SDXL-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.

from diffusers import AutoPipelineForImage2Image
from diffusers.utils import load_image
import torch

pipe = AutoPipelineForImage2Image.from_pretrained("stabilityai/sdxl-turbo", torch_dtype=torch.float16, variant="fp16")
pipe.to("cuda")

init_image = load_image("https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/diffusers/cat.png").resize((512, 512))

prompt = "cat wizard, gandalf, lord of the rings, detailed, fantasy, cute, adorable, Pixar, Disney, 8k"

image = pipe(prompt, image=init_image, num_inference_steps=2, strength=0.5, guidance_scale=0.0).images[0]

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. The model should not be used in any way that violates Stability AI's Acceptable Use Policy.

Limitations and Bias

Limitations

  • 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.

How to Get Started with the Model

Check out https://github.com/Stability-AI/generative-models

From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys unsloth-sdxl for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (unsloth-sdxl below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/images/generations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"unsloth-sdxl","prompt":"a red bicycle","size":"1024x1024"}'

Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.

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