ERNIE-Image

ERNIE-Image is Baidu’s 8B single-stream diffusion-transformer text-to-image family. It encodes prompts with a Ministral 3B text encoder and decodes with the 32-channel FLUX.2 VAE. Two checkpoints are supported:

• ERNIE-Image is the undistilled model. It runs at 50 steps with CFG 4.0 and supports negative prompts.
• ERNIE-Image Turbo is the distilled variant with the same architecture, tuned for 8 steps with CFG disabled (CFG Scale 1.0).

ERNIE-Image is text-to-image only. It can be used in the Generate tab and in the workflow editor, but not for image-to-image, inpainting or outpainting on the Canvas.

License

ERNIE-Image, ERNIE-Image Turbo and the Ministral 3B text encoder are released under Apache 2.0, which allows commercial use. None of the downloads is gated.

This is a summary, not legal advice. Read the full license on the model’s HuggingFace page before using a model commercially.

Hardware

See the System Requirements table. For scale: the single-file transformer alone is about 16 GB (5.0 GB as GGUF Q4_K_M, 8.7 GB as Q8_0) and the standalone Ministral 3B encoder about 7.7 GB. On smaller cards, Low-VRAM mode lets InvokeAI stream models that don’t fit entirely in VRAM.

Installing

The easiest path is the ERNIE-Image bundle in the Model Manager. It installs ERNIE-Image Turbo as a Diffusers pipeline. The undistilled ERNIE-Image is left out of the bundle because of its size, but it can be installed individually from the starter models.

ERNIE-Image needs three components:

Component	Diffusers install	Single-file install
Transformer	bundled	the .safetensors or .gguf file
Text encoder (Ministral 3B)	bundled	installed separately
VAE (FLUX.2)	bundled	installed separately

The starter models:

Starter	Source	Also installs
ERNIE-Image	baidu/ERNIE-Image (Diffusers)	nothing, everything is bundled
ERNIE-Image Turbo	baidu/ERNIE-Image-Turbo (Diffusers)	nothing, everything is bundled
ERNIE-Image (single file)	Comfy-Org single file (~16 GB)	Ministral 3B encoder + FLUX.2 VAE
ERNIE-Image Turbo (single file)	Comfy-Org single file (~16 GB)	Ministral 3B encoder + FLUX.2 VAE
ERNIE-Image (GGUF, Q4_K_M / Q8_0)	unsloth GGUF (5.0 / 8.7 GB)	Ministral 3B encoder + FLUX.2 VAE
ERNIE-Image Turbo (GGUF, Q4_K_M / Q8_0)	unsloth GGUF (5.0 / 8.7 GB)	Ministral 3B encoder + FLUX.2 VAE

The Diffusers pipelines also carry a prompt-enhancer model (see Prompt enhancer); the single files do not.

GGUF transformers load like the safetensors single file: the weights stay packed in memory and are unpacked layer by layer during generation, on every device. Measured on an RTX 4090 at 1024px with ERNIE-Image Turbo (8 steps): the Q4_K_M transformer holds 4.8 GB instead of 15.3 GB, the GPU peak drops from 23.6 GB to 17.8 GB, and an image takes 11.0 s against 11.6 s for the Diffusers pipeline. Other GGUF conversions with the same layout (for example vantagewithai’s) install as well. Quantized safetensors single files (fp8, int8) are not supported. A GGUF build of the Ministral 3B encoder is refused at install with a message naming the file to use instead, so the encoder stays the 7.7 GB safetensors file.

When a single-file ERNIE-Image model is selected, the Components section next to the model asks for:

• Mistral Encoder: the ERNIE-Image Ministral Encoder starter. Ministral 3B is a different architecture from the Mistral Small 3 encoder FLUX.2 uses, and the two are not interchangeable. The prompt enhancer from the Diffusers folder has the same shape as the encoder but is refused as one, with a message naming the file to install instead.
• VAE: a FLUX.2 VAE. ERNIE-Image uses the same VAE as FLUX.2, which is why it installs under the FLUX.2 base.

Turbo is recognized by name

ERNIE-Image and ERNIE-Image Turbo share an architecture, so InvokeAI can’t tell them apart from the weights. A model whose name contains turbo gets the Turbo defaults (8 steps, CFG 1.0); any other name gets the base defaults. If you install a Turbo checkpoint under another name, adjust the steps and CFG in its Default Settings.

Generation settings

Selecting an ERNIE-Image model applies these defaults:

Model	Steps	CFG Scale	Scheduler	Size
ERNIE-Image	50	4.0	Euler	1024×1024
ERNIE-Image Turbo	8	1.0	Euler	1024×1024

• CFG Scale: 1.0 turns CFG off. Values below 1.0 are not accepted.
• Negative prompt: only used when CFG Scale is above 1.0. With Turbo at 1.0 it has no effect.
• Schedulers: Euler (the default), Heun (2nd order) and LCM.
• Resolution: width and height must be multiples of 16.

ControlNet, reference images and regional prompting are not available for ERNIE-Image.

LoRA

ERNIE-Image LoRAs are supported in the layouts trainers publish them in: ai-toolkit and Civitai’s trainer (diffusion_model. prefix) and diffusers/PEFT exports (transformer. or base_model.model. prefix), including LoKR and LoHA layers. Files InvokeAI could not apply in full are refused when you install them: DoRA, incomplete layers (half a low-rank pair, a lone alpha), layers of the wrong shape for their module, layers that match no ERNIE-Image transformer module or sit beyond block 35, and anything on x_embedder.proj. ERNIE-Image LoRAs train the transformer only.

On a GGUF build, and with FP8 Storage, the LoRA is applied alongside the weights instead of being merged into them. It then stays in VRAM for the whole generation, and InvokeAI reserves room for it on top of the device_working_mem_gb reserve. Other builds reserve room for one module’s worth of LoRA, because layers that partial loading leaves in RAM run the same way.

Earlier versions identified ERNIE-Image LoRAs as Z-Image LoRAs. Select such a LoRA in the Model Manager and use Re-identify to fix it.

Prompt enhancer

The Diffusers ERNIE-Image pipelines include a prompt-enhancer language model that rewrites a short prompt into a more detailed one, sized for the target width and height. The Generate tab does not use it. To use it, build a workflow:

1. In Main Model - ERNIE-Image, leave Use Prompt Enhancer on (the default) and select a Diffusers ERNIE-Image model.
2. Connect its Prompt Enhancer output to a Prompt Enhancer - ERNIE-Image node, and give that node your prompt and the target width and height. Temperature (default 0.6) and Top P (default 0.95) control how freely it rewrites.
3. Feed the rewritten prompt into Prompt - ERNIE-Image, then on to Denoise - ERNIE-Image and Latents to Image - ERNIE-Image.

If no prompt enhancer is connected, for example with a single-file model, the node passes the prompt through unchanged. The rewritten prompt is written to the server log.