wuerstchen

Würstchen is a new framework for training text-conditional models by moving the computationally expensive text-conditional stage into a highly compressed latent space. Common approaches make use of a single stage compression, while Würstchen introduces another Stage that introduces even more compression. In total we have Stage A & B that are responsible for compressing images and Stage C that learns the text-conditional part in the low dimensional latent space. With that Würstchen achieves a 42x compression factor, while still reconstructing images faithfully. This enables training of Stage C to be fast and computationally cheap.