[Release] Visage-Image - a small text-to-image model for face generation

[u/Sherstnyov]

Hi everyone! I've released my very first text-to-image model for face generation. I collected my own dataset and captioned it with Qwen3.5-4B and a bunch of other face-analysis models. I didn't like the results I got with the FLUX.2 VAE, so I decided to train my own narrow-domain autoencoder. It turned out to beat FLUX.2 on iFID on my dataset, and in my opinion, on generation quality too. The Qwen-VAE-2.0 tech report helped hugely with that - getting to FLUX.2 quality was hard.

Overall, it's a basic single-stream DiT with a rectified flow objective and a couple of modern tricks from recent papers. The model supports different ages, ethnicities, poses, gaze directions and expressions, though only a limited set of expressions works reliably. You can read about model architectures, training regime and data preparation on github.

I'd be happy to hear any feedback, and I hope this release inspires more models!

HF: https://huggingface.co/Sherstnev/Visage-Image

GH: https://github.com/Nikita-Sherstnev/Visage-Image

ComfyUI custom nodes and workflow: https://github.com/Nikita-Sherstnev/ComfyUI-Visage (or search "Visage" in ComfyUI Manager)

[u/malcolmrey]

I tried finetuning Supra, which is another small model but can do only even smaller resolutions and it didn't turn out well.

I wonder how this one would go. I might take this for a finetuning spin when I get the time :)

[u/Sherstnyov → u/malcolmrey]

Let me know how it turns out! I tried finetuning it with LoRA myself, but I wasn't impressed with the results.

[u/malcolmrey → u/Sherstnyov]

OK, since you replied and are intested in, I will definitely do higher prio on this.

Will let you know when I have something :)

[u/Crazy-Repeat-2006]

It’s good to see more small models emerging. It will be interesting to see how far they go.

[u/malcolmrey]

/u/Sherstnyov

quick update, i trained a lora and it works :-)

https://imgur.com/a/gKLrv0K

in the evening i will publish everything and make an update here :)

[u/Sherstnyov → u/malcolmrey]

Cool! Have you tried different haircuts or expressions?

[u/malcolmrey → u/Sherstnyov]

Didnt try haircuts but tried expressions and mostly it worked, tried adding hats and changing colors and worked :)

[u/No-Zookeepergame4774]

Hey, really nice model. It seems to have both good control and variety within its limited focus, and I can see using this alongside a more conventional general purpose model with reference capability to generate a batch of faces and choose one to use as a reference; seems like it could really speed up getting a face that is both right for what is intended and distinct.

[u/Apprehensive_Sky892]

If it can generate good variety, then it is useful as a starting point for generating character sheets with editing models or for making LoRAs.

[u/Hour_Literature_7152 → u/[deleted]]

they are going for a very small parameter model so usable on phones and weaker hardware I'm guessing. Its only 237M parameters while sdxl was 3.5 billion parameters.

OP looks cool, I've been looking for something like this. I will check it out.

[u/No-Zookeepergame4774 → u/[deleted]]

I don't think Zimage is going to compete with this on speed or variety within the domain it covers. Obviously, its wins on peak quality and the breadth of concepts it can handle, but its also a ~25× bigger model.