BudgetPix: Compute-Adaptive Tokenization for Pixel-Space Image Diffusion

Checkpoints of the public reimplementation of BudgetPix. Pixel-space diffusion transformers spend the same compute on flat sky as on a face; BudgetPix lets one model run at many compute budgets. An entropy quadtree merges flat regions of the image into coarser tokens, the backbone runs on the shorter sequence, and a small token-local refiner puts the detail back inside each merged token. Every added module is zero-initialised, so the adapted model starts as the released model; at inference a single checkpoint is driven with a token budget. The code that loads, samples from and trains these files is at https://github.com/budgetpix/BudgetPix-public.
Every file is the inference-only EMA weights of the full adapted model (released backbone plus the added modules) in fp32, with the geometry and trainer arguments it was trained with.
| file | model | task | resolution | dense tokens | size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
budgetpix_jit_b16_256.pth |
JiT-B/16 | class-conditional ImageNet | 256 | 256 | 0.53 GB |
budgetpix_jit_b32_512.pth |
JiT-B/32 | class-conditional ImageNet | 512 | 256 | 0.54 GB |
budgetpix_jit_l16_256.pth |
JiT-L/16 | class-conditional ImageNet | 256 | 256 | 1.85 GB |
budgetpix_jit_l32_512.pth |
JiT-L/32 | class-conditional ImageNet | 512 | 256 | 1.86 GB |
budgetpix_minit2i_b_512.pt |
MiniT2I-B/16 | text-to-image | 512 | 1024 | 1.04 GB |
budgetpix_minit2i_l_512.pt |
MiniT2I-L/16 | text-to-image | 512 | 1024 | 3.66 GB |
budgetpix_pixeldit_1024.pt |
PixelDiT-T2I 1.3B | text-to-image | 1024 | 4096 | 5.23 GB |
budgetpix_pmf_l16_256.pt |
pMF-L/16 | one-step class-conditional ImageNet | 256 | 256 | 2.07 GB |
Extras for the pMF line: pmf_released_B16_full_uv.pt and pmf_released_L16_full_uv.pt are the released pixel MeanFlow
weights (Lyy0725/pMF, MIT) converted to PyTorch with the auxiliary v-branch that
fine-tuning needs; the Hub's inference files carry the u-path only. SHA256SUMS lists the hash of every file.
Usage
git clone https://github.com/budgetpix/BudgetPix-public && cd BudgetPix-public
pip install -r requirements.txt
python scripts/download_checkpoints.py --all # fetches from this repo and checks the hashes
cd jit && python sample.py --ckpt ../checkpoints/budgetpix_jit_l32_512.pth --budget 128 --classes 207,88,417,933 --overlay
The MiniT2I, PixelDiT and pMF lines import the official PyTorch code of those models at run time (MINIT2I_ROOT,
PIXELDIT_ROOT, PMF_ROOT); the text encoders (google/flan-t5-large, Efficient-Large-Model/gemma-2-2b-it) are
downloaded from the Hub on first use. See the GitHub README for sampling, training and evaluation commands.
License
The JiT, MiniT2I and pMF checkpoints derive from MIT-licensed weights and are released under MIT. The PixelDiT checkpoint derives from NVIDIA's released PixelDiT weights and is subject to the NVIDIA License (NSCLv1), which permits non-commercial research use only.
Citation
@article{kara2026budgetpix,
title={BudgetPix: Compute-Adaptive Tokenization for Pixel-Space Image Diffusion},
author={Ozgur Kara and Yujia Chen and Daniel Watson and David Forsyth and James Matthew Rehg and Wen-Sheng Chu and Du Tran},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.12307},
year={2026}
}