<h1 id="overview-9xehcrwba">Overview</h1>I am an artist with complete Aphantasia. That means I do not have a mind's eye. I used to think the phrase "picture it in your mind" was a figure of speech. When I discovered the vivid world inside the minds of others, I was heartbroken. Around the same time, a friend introduced me to Stable Diffusion. Here was something that could turn my mental narratives back into images. It felt like a gift.I set out to really explore the possibilities of generative AI as a concept visualization assistive technology. I vowed to create and share resources to enable this for others. That's how this checkpoint began. For this purpose, I believe a successful checkpoint should be:<ol><li>General purpose</li><li>Efficient</li><li>Accessible</li></ol>I set about finding out how to define and accomplish that. I found Civitai. By looking around, I arrived at definitions for those terms, which became goals for this checkpoint.<ol><li>A general-purpose checkpoint can generate images of many different styles, is based on a model that is, and shows promise to continue to be, popular, and works well with LoRAs.</li><li>An efficient model can generate useable images often and in few steps. Looking around at LCM and Turbo models, four steps became my target.</li><li>An accessible model is readily available at a popular destination and easy to prompt for.</li></ol>I then began experimenting with block merging. I decided on the SDXL family with the Turbo version being particularly attractive for its speed. Then I merged the SDXL DPO U-Net to increase output quality. I was just about satisfied with the result of 1024x1024 images at four steps when SDXL Lightning was introduced. It was something which I could not ignore because it so closely aligned with my goals, so I postponed my plans to upload the prior version to incorporate any gains SDXL Lightning could provide. That formed the basis for the first version.<h1 id="version-1-qcqhgyka7">Version 1</h1>Based on SDXL Lightning, version 1 performs well at the target size of 1024x1024 and in four steps with DPM++ SDE Karras at CFG Scales 1-2.5.<h1 id="version-2-8k5usu2vx">Version 2</h1>Based on SDXL Hyper and finetuned with a dataset of over a thousand curated images, version 2 performs well at the target size of 1024x1024.In an efficiency improvement over version 1, great results can be achieved in three to four steps with DPM++ SDE Karras at CFG Scales 1 through 2.5.Additionally, amazing images can be produced in five to six steps with Euler Ancestral Simple at CFG Scales 1 through 2.5.<h1 id="version-2-+-pcm-to44kskbk">Version 2 + PCM</h1>Incorporating the best parts of Version 2 and a Phased Consistency Model, generated images are similar to version 2, but perhaps a bit more vivid. In the same configuration, it produced more visually pleasing results with AnimateDiff SDXL.Like version 2, great results can be achieved in three to four steps with DPM++ SDE Karras at CFG Scales 1 through 2.5.Additionally, amazing images can be produced in five to six steps with Euler Ancestral Simple at CFG Scales 1 through 2.5.

RePhantasia

Improvements to overall image quality befitting a first release.

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