Model reference · open weights

bk-sdm-tiny

Image nota-ai Text→image 1 build Open weights 1k dl/mo

bk-sdm-tiny is an open-weight image model from nota-ai. bk-sdm-tiny (FP32) weighs 834 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • bk-sdm-tiny is a text-to-image model developed by nota-ai that uses an architecturally compressed U-Net derived from Stable Diffusion v1.4.
  • It contains 323 million parameters and was trained on 212,776 image-text pairs from the LAION-Aesthetics V2 6.5+ dataset.
  • The model is released under the creativeml-openrail-m license and is intended for research purposes.

Summary of the nota-ai/bk-sdm-tiny model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bynota-ai
Released2023-07-12
Parameters323M
VRAM834 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for bk-sdm-tiny (FP32)

834 MBweights, file size
323 MBbiggest part
5.0 GBworking memory, one 1024² image
537 MBruntime overhead
CardOne imageMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 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 nota-ai says about bk-sdm-tiny

Read the model card

Block-removed Knowledge-distilled Stable Diffusion Model (BK-SDM) is an architecturally compressed SDM for efficient general-purpose text-to-image synthesis. This model is bulit with (i) removing several residual and attention blocks from the U-Net of Stable Diffusion v1.4 and (ii) distillation pretraining on only 0.22M LAION pairs (fewer than 0.1% of the full training set). Despite being trained with very limited resources, our compact model can imitate the original SDM by benefiting from transferred knowledge.

Examples with 🤗Diffusers library.

An inference code with the default PNDM scheduler and 50 denoising steps is as follows.

import torch
from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline

pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("nota-ai/bk-sdm-tiny", torch_dtype=torch.float16)
pipe = pipe.to("cuda")

prompt = "a tropical bird sitting on a branch of a tree"
image = pipe(prompt).images[0]

image.save("example.png")

The following code is also runnable, because we compressed the U-Net of Stable Diffusion v1.4 while keeping the other parts (i.e., Text Encoder and Image Decoder) unchanged:

import torch
from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline, UNet2DConditionModel

pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("CompVis/stable-diffusion-v1-4", torch_dtype=torch.float16)
pipe.unet = UNet2DConditionModel.from_pretrained("nota-ai/bk-sdm-tiny", subfolder="unet", torch_dtype=torch.float16)
pipe = pipe.to("cuda")

prompt = "a tropical bird sitting on a branch of a tree"
image = pipe(prompt).images[0]

image.save("example.png")

Compression Method

U-Net Architecture

Certain residual and attention blocks were eliminated from the U-Net of SDM-v1.4:

  • 1.04B-param SDM-v1.4 (0.86B-param U-Net): the original source model.
  • 0.76B-param BK-SDM-Base (0.58B-param U-Net): obtained with ① fewer blocks in outer stages.
  • 0.66B-param BK-SDM-Small (0.49B-param U-Net): obtained with ① and ② mid-stage removal.
  • 0.50B-param BK-SDM-Tiny (0.33B-param U-Net): obtained with ①, ②, and ③ further inner-stage removal.

Distillation Pretraining

The compact U-Net was trained to mimic the behavior of the original U-Net. We leveraged feature-level and output-level distillation, along with the denoising task loss.

  • Training Data: 212,776 image-text pairs (i.e., 0.22M pairs) from LAION-Aesthetics V2 6.5+.
  • Hardware: A single NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU
  • Gradient Accumulations: 4
  • Batch: 256 (=4×64)
  • Optimizer: AdamW
  • Learning Rate: a constant learning rate of 5e-5 for 50K-iteration pretraining

Experimental Results

The following table shows the zero-shot results on 30K samples from the MS-COCO validation split. After generating 512×512 images with the PNDM scheduler and 25 denoising steps, we downsampled them to 256×256 for evaluating generation scores. Our models were drawn at the 50K-th training iteration.

ModelFID↓IS↑CLIP Score↑(ViT-g/14)# Params,U-Net# Params,Whole SDM
Stable Diffusion v1.413.0536.760.29580.86B1.04B
BK-SDM-Base (Ours)15.7633.790.28780.58B0.76B
BK-SDM-Small (Ours)16.9831.680.26770.49B0.66B
BK-SDM-Tiny (Ours)17.1230.090.26530.33B0.50B

The following figure depicts synthesized images with some MS-COCO captions.

Uses

Note: This section is taken from the Stable Diffusion v1 model card (which was based on the DALLE-MINI model card) and applies in the same way to BK-SDMs.

Direct Use

The model is intended for research purposes only. Possible research areas and tasks include

  • 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.
  • Research on generative models.

Excluded uses are described below.

Misuse, Malicious Use, and Out-of-Scope Use

The model should not be used to intentionally create or disseminate images that create hostile or alienating environments for people. This includes generating images that people would foreseeably find disturbing, distressing, or offensive; or content that propagates historical or current stereotypes.

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.

Misuse and Malicious Use

Using the model to generate content that is cruel to individuals is a misuse of this model. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Generating demeaning, dehumanizing, or otherwise harmful representations of people or their environments, cultures, religions, etc.
  • Intentionally promoting or propagating discriminatory content or harmful stereotypes.
  • Impersonating individuals without their consent.
  • Sexual content without consent of the people who might see it.
  • Mis- and disinformation
  • Re

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("nota-ai/bk-sdm-tiny", 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
© 2026 AxForge · EU-hosted AI infrastructure Pricing Docs Trust Privacy Terms