about
Meissonic, High-Resolution Text-to-Image Synthesis on consumer graphics cards (arxiv.org)
65 points by jinqueeny on Oct 14, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 4 comments on HN

In plain words: Instead of slowly refining noise like today's image generators, this model paints a picture by filling in hidden patches all at once, guided by the text prompt. It matches or beats a leading generator at 1024-pixel images while running more efficiently.

Abstract · Meissonic: Revitalizing Masked Generative Transformers for Efficient High-Resolution Text-to-Image Synthesis

We present Meissonic, which elevates non-autoregressive masked image modeling (MIM) text-to-image to a level comparable with state-of-the-art diffusion models like SDXL. By incorporating a comprehensive suite of architectural innovations, advanced positional encoding strategies, and optimized sampling conditions, Meissonic substantially improves MIM's performance and efficiency. Additionally, we leverage high-quality training data, integrate micro-conditions informed by human preference scores, and employ feature compression layers to further enhance image fidelity and resolution. Our model not only matches but often exceeds the performance of existing models like SDXL in generating high-quality, high-resolution images. Extensive experiments validate Meissonic's capabilities, demonstrating its potential as a new standard in text-to-image synthesis. We release a model checkpoint capable of producing $1024 \times 1024$ resolution images.

Jinbin Bai, Tian Ye, Wei Chow, Enxin Song, Xiangtai Li, Zhen Dong, Lei Zhu, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv:2410.08261 · cs.CV · submitted Oct 10, 2024 · updated Mar 13, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ICLR 2025. Codes and Supplementary Material: https://github.com/viiika/Meissonic

add comment on HN

>Meissonic, with just 1B parameters, offers comparable or superior 1024×1024 high-resolution, aesthetically pleasing images while being able to run on consumer-grade GPUs with only 8GB VRAM without the need for any additional model optimizations. Moreover, Meissonic effortlessly generates images with solid-color backgrounds, a feature that usually demands model fine-tuning or noise offset adjustments in diffusion models.

This looks really cool. Also nice to see another architecture being used for image generation besides diffusion. It seems like every NLP problem can be solved with transformers now: text generation/understanding, image generation/understanding, translation, OCR. Perhaps llama 4/5 will have image generation as well. eidt: llama 3.2 already has image editing, they probably just don't want to release an image generator for other reasons.

Interesting how pretty much all the example images look like renders/paintings as opposed to photographs. Maybe that's what it's trained on?
> It’s crucial to highlight the resource efficiency of our training process. Our training is considerably more resource-efficient compared to Stable Diffusion (Podell et al., 2023). Meissonic is trained in approximately 48 H100 GPU days

From scratch training of an image synthesis model for the price of a graphic card isn't something I expected anytime soon!

The images in the PDF are amazing.