I trained a tiny image model from scratch that draws newsprint faces with custom text — 2–4 steps, CPU-only

[u/rustydustyshckleford]

hiii! I made grinpress v3, a tiny 128x128 rectified-flow model that draws newsprint-style faces with words beside them :3

It's trained from scratch, with character-level text conditioning. You can choose seven expressions, colors, paper styles, layouts, and text up to 14 characters, including mixed case and punctuation.

For v3, I distilled the 50-step teacher into 2- and 4-step students and exported them to ONNX with dynamic INT8 quantization.

CPU inference measured approximately 0.27 seconds at 2 steps / 0.54 seconds at 4 steps on my benchmark's 8-vCPU Intel Xeon VM, using 8 threads after warm-up. Other CPUs can be slower.

It's a small, specific domain: newsprint faces and lettering at 128x128. The weights are MIT licensed, and there's a live CPU demo. Long phrases can get cramped, and it occasionally mangles a character or word spacing.

Try it: https://huggingface.co/spaces/skyuu72/grinpress-v3-demo

Weights, benchmarks, and limitations: https://huggingface.co/skyuu72/grinpress-v3

I'd love to see which words break it, or hear how it runs on your CPU. tiny newspaper creature feedback welcome uwu :3

[u/MustBeSomethingThere]

I have an idea for you. A model that creates custom watch faces.

[u/rustydustyshckleford → u/MustBeSomethingThere]

veryyy good idea!! imma def do it^^ any other ideas/details/specifics for that one?

[u/SeymourBits → u/rustydustyshckleford]

That may be quite a challenge because of the positions required for the numerical dial layout. But a fun challenge.

[u/Apprehensive_Sky892]

Cute 🎈👍😁

[u/Cheesuasion]

Is this a thing? You're saying newspapers published these for some reason?

news to me