Clover-Image-Tiny

Models

Use the regular model to generate an image from text. Use Inpaint HQ to edit a masked region of an existing image. Both run locally after the model and dependencies are downloaded.

Clover Image Tiny	Clover Inpaint HQ
Text → image. Compact SD 1.4-class generation with a 323.4M-parameter denoiser.	Image + mask + text → edit. SD 1.5-class inpainting with Clover's shared components. A larger, separate checkpoint.

The regular Diffusers package is about 1.67 GB, including its text encoder, VAE, and safety checker. The 323.4M count describes the denoiser, not the complete pipeline. Inpainting uses a separate checkpoint; neither download includes the Python environment. The hosted demo runs remotely; local Python and Core ML workflows run on your hardware after setup.

Examples

Selected outputs from the regular model, with their original prompts.

Moonlit greenhouse	Blue flowers	Stained-glass night
“a tiny glass greenhouse glowing in a moonlit garden”	“A bouquet of blue flowers”	“A stain glass window of a starry night”

Inpainting example

Inpainting regenerates the white area of a mask. Black marks the area to preserve. This published before-and-after example uses the prompt “add blue sunglasses.”

Before	After the masked edit

Inpaint HQ provides SD 1.5-class masked editing. For exact preservation outside the edited region, composite the result through the original binary mask. Its full-size inpainting denoiser and shared components are documented in the inpainting model card.

Styles

Optional LoRA adapters change the model's visual style. Below is the same greenhouse prompt with the base model, Monet, Pointillism, and Watercolor Anime.

Clover	Monet	Pointillism	Watercolor Anime
Base model	Get Monet	Get Pointillism	Get Watercolor Anime

Model facts

Evaluation

Compact model, practical generation speed

Clover combines a 323.4M-parameter denoiser with 1.024-second mean generation in the published NVIDIA A10G test. It retains the compact architecture while adding Clover's distillation pass, style adapters, and separate Core ML deployment options.

Test settings: 16 prompts, 512 × 512, 30 DDIM steps, guidance 7.5, after warm-up. Lower values mean less time, memory, or denoiser storage—not automatically better images. These are GPU results, not older-device or iPhone timings.

Clover runs in the same approximate one-second range as BK-SDM-Tiny-2M and Segmind Tiny-SD in this test. Other references lead individual latency, memory, and CLIP metrics; the comparison does not establish an overall quality or speed lead.

↓ Lower is better for size, latency, and memory; ↑ higher is better for CLIP prompt alignment. Bold marks the best result in each column, including ties. Parameter counts describe footprint, not image quality.

CLIP cosine measures prompt alignment, not overall visual quality. The latency gaps between Clover, BK-SDM-Tiny-2M, and Segmind Tiny-SD are below 0.4% and should be read as near parity, not an established speed advantage.

Benchmark protocol, all outputs, and raw results.

Usage notes

Can I use Clover offline? Yes. Download the model and dependencies first, then use --local-files-only with the local runner. No hosted generation service is required.

Does it work on a Mac? The Python path supports Apple silicon through PyTorch MPS. NVIDIA systems use CUDA; CPU inference is also supported, but slower.

Is normal Clover the same as Inpaint HQ? They are separate checkpoints. Normal Clover creates images from text. Inpaint HQ takes an image, a mask, and a prompt, and uses a larger denoiser.

What are its limits? Hands, faces, readable text, precise counts, and complex relationships can be unreliable. Examples are selected outputs; results vary with prompts and settings. The packaged safety checker in the Python runner and hosted demo is imperfect.

Model lineage, license, and research details

Clover starts from BK-SDM-Tiny-2M and adds a recorded 500-step distillation pass against Stable Diffusion 1.4. It retains the compact architecture; its U-Net weights are refreshed.

Model weights use CreativeML Open RAIL-M and the example code uses Apache-2.0. See the component license ledger for the full terms and inherited obligations.

Data provenance · All nine prompt examples

Full gallery

Technical documentation

Setup instructions, comparisons, training records, licenses, and checkpoint identifiers are retained below. The Documentation link above opens the standalone reference.

1.1 Model profile

The package figure includes the text encoder, VAE, tokenizer/configuration, and the enabled upstream safety checker; it is therefore larger than the denoiser alone. Component sizes are approximate runtime-footprint context, not a claim that every byte is active in every backend.

Model origin

Clover keeps BK-SDM-Tiny-2M's U-Net architecture and parameter count. The additional Clover training changes the U-Net weights; the tokenizer, text encoder, and VAE retain the pinned upstream components.

iPhone and Core ML

The companion Clover Image Tiny iOS project follows Apple platform conventions and exposes prompt, negative prompt, steps, guidance, seed, image count, scheduler, random generator, and compute target. Its model picker downloads SHA-256-verified, immutable Core ML resources from Hugging Face; the large weights are not committed to the Xcode project or bundled into the app.

The base Core ML resources are published separately:

• neonforestmist/Clover-Image-Tiny-CoreML

Each trained style is available both as a standard Diffusers LoRA and as its own Core ML picker download:

See COREML.md for conversion details and training/README.md for the pinned LoRA jobs.

3. Small-model benchmark

Clover is compared with its pinned BK-SDM-Tiny-2M base and two public same-family references using 16 prompts, identical seeds, 512×512 output, 30 DDIM steps, guidance 7.5, and a shared NVIDIA A10G runtime. The measurement is an engineering comparison, not a human-preference leaderboard.

↓ Lower is better for size, latency, and memory; ↑ higher is better for CLIP prompt alignment. Bold marks the best result in each column, including ties. Parameter counts describe footprint, not image quality.

Clover's measured strengths are its joint-smallest denoiser (323.4M parameters) and roughly one-second generation (1.024 s/image) in this test. Its latency is within 0.4% of BK-SDM-Tiny-2M and Segmind Tiny-SD; that small gap is not an established speed advantage. BK-SDM-v2-Tiny is faster here, while Segmind Tiny-SD uses less memory and has the highest CLIP score.

The table keeps denoiser size and loaded pipeline size separate. The former is the most useful apples-to-apples model comparison; the latter includes the text encoder, VAE, and other loaded components and is runtime context rather than a download-size metric.

CLIP cosine is only a prompt-adherence proxy. It is not a human-quality score, FID, safety evaluation, or evidence that these models are interchangeable. The complete protocol, machine-readable results, and generated examples are in benchmarks/text-to-image/ and the full benchmark report.

5. Run locally

Download once, then generate offline with the bundled runner. Python 3.11 and 3.12 are supported.

5.1 macOS — Apple silicon

mkdir clover-image-tiny-local
cd clover-image-tiny-local

python3.12 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install "huggingface-hub==0.36.2"

hf download "neonforestmist/Clover-Image-Tiny" --local-dir model
python -m pip install -r model/requirements.txt

python model/examples/generate.py \
  --model model \
  --device mps \
  --local-files-only \
  --prompt "a tiny glass greenhouse glowing in a moonlit garden, detailed photography" \
  --negative-prompt "blurry, distorted, low detail" \
  --steps 50 \
  --guidance-scale 7.5 \
  --scheduler pndm \
  --seed 1337 \
  --output clover-image-tiny.png

open clover-image-tiny.png

Use python3.11 instead if that is the installed supported Python.

5.2 Windows — PowerShell

mkdir clover-image-tiny-local
cd clover-image-tiny-local

py -3.12 -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install "huggingface-hub==0.36.2"

hf download "neonforestmist/Clover-Image-Tiny" --local-dir model
python -m pip install -r model\requirements.txt

python model\examples\generate.py `
  --model model `
  --device auto `
  --local-files-only `
  --prompt "a tiny glass greenhouse glowing in a moonlit garden, detailed photography" `
  --negative-prompt "blurry, distorted, low detail" `
  --steps 50 `
  --guidance-scale 7.5 `
  --scheduler pndm `
  --seed 1337 `
  --output clover-image-tiny.png

Invoke-Item .\clover-image-tiny.png

Use py -3.11 if needed. With --device auto, the runner selects an available NVIDIA CUDA GPU and otherwise uses CPU.

5.3 Linux

mkdir clover-image-tiny-local
cd clover-image-tiny-local

python3.12 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install "huggingface-hub==0.36.2"

hf download "neonforestmist/Clover-Image-Tiny" --local-dir model
python -m pip install -r model/requirements.txt

python model/examples/generate.py \
  --model model \
  --device auto \
  --local-files-only \
  --prompt "a tiny glass greenhouse glowing in a moonlit garden, detailed photography" \
  --negative-prompt "blurry, distorted, low detail" \
  --steps 50 \
  --seed 1337 \
  --output clover-image-tiny.png

--device auto selects CUDA when PyTorch can see an NVIDIA GPU and otherwise uses CPU. After the first download, --local-files-only prevents network access during generation.

6. Generation controls

The command above is ready to copy. Change these flags to explore the model:

The reference configuration is 50-step PNDM, guidance 7.5, 512×512, one image, seed 1337, and an empty negative prompt. The live demo pre-fills blurry, distorted, low detail; the local runner leaves the field empty unless you pass the flag.

For multiple images, the first uses the requested filename and later images use numbered names such as clover-image-tiny-02.png. Seeds advance from the requested seed. A JSON sidecar beside the first PNG records every resolved setting, output filename, seed, checksum, and safety result. Existing planned outputs are never overwritten.

Run python model/examples/generate.py --help for the complete CLI reference.

7. Hardware and operating systems

Keep at least 2 GB free for the model alone and additional room for the Python environment and caches; no formal total-install minimum has been measured. Larger images and batches need more memory; lower --width, --height, or --num-images if necessary.

The measured Mac reference used a 24 GB Apple M4 Pro and completed one 512×512 image in 18.21 seconds with fp16 MPS. Its process-lifetime maximum RSS was 631,341,056 bytes. This is a measured point, not a minimum-RAM claim. No Core ML package is required for the Python path.

8. Python API

import torch
from diffusers import DiffusionPipeline, PNDMScheduler

model_id = "neonforestmist/Clover-Image-Tiny"
if torch.cuda.is_available():
    device = "cuda"
elif torch.backends.mps.is_available():
    device = "mps"
else:
    device = "cpu"

dtype = torch.float16 if device in {"cuda", "mps"} else torch.float32
pipe = DiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(model_id, torch_dtype=dtype)
pipe.scheduler = PNDMScheduler.from_config(pipe.scheduler.config)
pipe = pipe.to(device)

generator_device = "cuda" if device == "cuda" else "cpu"
generator = torch.Generator(device=generator_device).manual_seed(1337)
image = pipe(
    prompt="a tiny greenhouse glowing in a moonlit garden",
    negative_prompt="blurry, distorted, low detail",
    num_inference_steps=50,
    guidance_scale=7.5,
    height=512,
    width=512,
    generator=generator,
).images[0]
image.save("clover-image-tiny.png")

Seeded generation is repeatable within the selected runtime. Different devices, dtypes, kernels, and dependency builds can produce different pixels.

9. About this release

Clover Image Tiny is a conventional knowledge-distillation checkpoint trained for 500 optimizer steps on an exact licensed 1,000-pair calibration set. This was a real U-Net optimization run—not a repackaging operation. Its final cursor records 4,000 microsteps and 4,000 sample presentations, with finite training rows and nonzero gradients throughout.

The model was initialized from nota-ai/bk-sdm-tiny-2m@aad3e0e8ba61b7cb9f64869dc4e586f8ad9d3665 and distilled with a frozen CompVis/stable-diffusion-v1-4@133a221b8aa7292a167afc5127cb63fb5005638b teacher. It is a genuinely modified checkpoint, but it was not trained from random initialization.

9.1 Clover distillation recipe

Each objective contributed something complementary: the diffusion term retained the standard epsilon-prediction task, output KD pulled the compact student toward the full teacher's denoising prediction, and feature KD aligned internal representations at six explicitly mapped points across the down, attention, and up paths. Teacher execution used no_grad; no teacher, CLIP text-encoder, or VAE gradients were accumulated. This gives Clover a targeted weight refresh without increasing its U-Net parameter count or abandoning standard Stable Diffusion/Diffusers compatibility.

This repository contains the PyTorch/Diffusers checkpoint. Core ML artifacts, style adapters, and the companion iOS project are versioned separately and linked above.

10. Quality and known behavior

• The included gallery demonstrates recognizable subjects across colorful scenes, products, food, an animal, a landscape, and an interior.
• Individual results vary by prompt, seed, scheduler, and step count. More steps increase runtime but do not guarantee a better result.
• Hands, anatomy, exact counts and relationships, and readable text can be difficult.
• The small-model comparison is an engineering benchmark with a CLIP prompt-adherence proxy, not a controlled human-preference study.
• Resolution and batch size multiply memory use.

11. Safety

The upstream safety checker is packaged and enabled in both the supported runner and hosted demo. A flagged output may be returned as a black placeholder; the JSON sidecar records nsfw_content_detected so the result is not silent. The checker is useful but not a complete moderation system and can miss harmful content or over-filter benign content.

Applications should add controls appropriate to their audience and review outputs before sharing them. Do not use the model for consequential decisions, identity claims, medical or legal conclusions, harassment, exploitation, illegal activity, or uses prohibited by CreativeML OpenRAIL-M.

12. Training lineage and data

• Clover fine-tuning data: exactly 1,000 accepted image-caption pairs from Spawning/PD3M@2a5eb24a8dccf245acd8e56341761aee06da0bdf
• Split: 973 train, 17 validation, and 10 test records
• Data gate: CDLA-Permissive-2.0; accepted items retain CC0-1.0 or Public Domain Mark 1.0 provenance
• Preprocessing: deterministic center crop and 512×512 JPEG conversion, version clover-pd3m-center-crop-512-jpeg95-v1
• Dataset-manifest SHA-256: 50c1249f1cb0d8d690a9acc451ca10c9432eb5a7f4e26f34acb5462096e72322

The set was chosen by a deterministic hash ordering from the pinned PD3M revision, then validated for license, dimensions, MIME type, source organization, payload integrity, and deletion-list status. The resulting shard, manifest, rejection log, selection statistics, and preprocessing recipe were all checksummed. This is a deliberately small calibration pass layered on top of BK-SDM-Tiny-2M's much larger inherited pretraining—not a claim that Clover learned general image generation from only 1,000 examples.

The 1,000 records describe the Clover fine-tuning run. The student and teacher already contain knowledge from larger upstream corpora. Their pinned model cards and weight licenses are disclosed, while complete item-level provenance for all foundational pretraining is not available to this project.

See DATA_PROVENANCE.md for the portable manifest identity and MODEL_DATA_LICENSES.md for the complete component ledger.

14. Licenses

The model weights are a derivative under CreativeML OpenRAIL-M. The example runner and packaging code are under Apache-2.0. Dataset and item-level terms remain separate. Read LICENSE, LICENSE-MODEL-CREATIVEML-OPENRAIL-M.txt, LICENSE-CODE, and MODEL_DATA_LICENSES.md before redistribution or use.

The legacy hero mosaic is user-supplied presentation artwork included by explicit request for display in this public model repository. It is not benchmark evidence, its panel-generation provenance is not claimed, and this package does not grant a downstream reuse license for it.

15. Reproducibility and artifact identity

checksums.json covers every file in the immutable validated release package at the recorded builder commit. Later model-card-only revisions are additionally preserved by the Hugging Face Git history.

Citation

If you use Clover Image Tiny in your work, please cite the model release:

@software{lozadaperez2026cloverimagetiny,
  author = {Lukas Lozada Perez},
  title = {Clover Image Tiny: Compact Local Text-to-Image Diffusion},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/neonforestmist/Clover-Image-Tiny}
}

Licenses

The model weights are a derivative under CreativeML OpenRAIL-M. The example runner and packaging code are under Apache-2.0. Dataset and item-level terms remain separate. Read LICENSE, LICENSE-MODEL-CREATIVEML-OPENRAIL-M.txt, LICENSE-CODE, and MODEL_DATA_LICENSES.md before redistribution or use.

The hero mosaic is user-supplied presentation artwork included by explicit request for display in this public model repository. It is not benchmark evidence, its panel-generation provenance is not claimed, and this package does not grant a downstream reuse license for it.

Created by Lukas Lozada Perez.