Papers › SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis

SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis

4 Jul 2023arXiv:2307.01952archive 2025-07-28

Dustin Podell, Zion English, Kyle Lacey, Andreas Blattmann, Tim Dockhorn, Jonas Müller, Joe Penna, Robin Rombach

We present SDXL, a latent diffusion model for text-to-image synthesis. Compared to previous versions of Stable Diffusion, SDXL leverages a three times larger UNet backbone: The increase of model parameters is mainly due to more attention blocks and a larger cross-attention context as SDXL uses a second text encoder. We design multiple novel conditioning schemes and train SDXL on multiple aspect ratios. We also introduce a refinement model which is used to improve the visual fidelity of samples generated by SDXL using a post-hoc image-to-image technique. We demonstrate that SDXL shows drastically improved performance compared the previous versions of Stable Diffusion and achieves results competitive with those of black-box state-of-the-art image generators. In the spirit of promoting open research and fostering transparency in large model training and evaluation, we provide access to code and model weights at https://github.com/Stability-AI/generative-models

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Tasks

Image Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
WISE SDXL Biology 0.44 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
WISE SDXL Chemistry 0.27 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
WISE SDXL Cultural 0.43 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
WISE SDXL Overall 0.43 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
WISE SDXL Physics 0.45 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
WISE SDXL Space 0.47 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
WISE SDXL Time 0.48 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation WISE stable-diffusion-xl-base-0.9 Biology 0.44 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation WISE stable-diffusion-xl-base-0.9 Chemistry 0.27 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation WISE stable-diffusion-xl-base-0.9 Cultural 0.43 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation WISE stable-diffusion-xl-base-0.9 Overall 0.43 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation WISE stable-diffusion-xl-base-0.9 Physics 0.45 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation WISE stable-diffusion-xl-base-0.9 Space 0.47 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Image Generation WISE stable-diffusion-xl-base-0.9 Time 0.48 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

DiffusionLatent Diffusion Model

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