| # π¨ MicroForge: A Novel Mobile-First Image Generation Architecture |
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| > **Recurrent Latent Planning Γ SSM-Conv Hybrid Backbone Γ Deep Compression** |
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| MicroForge is a genuinely new image generation architecture designed from scratch for consumer devices (3-4 GB RAM), trainable on a single 16 GB GPU. It combines the best ideas from recent research into an efficient, compact, editing-ready system. |
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| **Key numbers:** |
| - **MicroForge-tiny**: 28M params, ~56 MB fp16, ~0.13s/image on CPU |
| - **MicroForge-small**: 114M params, ~228 MB fp16 |
| - **MicroForge-base**: 193M params, ~386 MB fp16 |
| - **Editing-ready**: Same backbone handles generation, editing, inpainting, super-res |
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| --- |
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| ## Table of Contents |
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| 1. [Architecture Overview](#1-architecture-overview) |
| 2. [Paper Shortlist & Critique](#2-paper-shortlist--critique) |
| 3. [Module-by-Module Design](#3-module-by-module-design) |
| 4. [Mathematical Formulation](#4-mathematical-formulation) |
| 5. [Training Objective](#5-training-objective) |
| 6. [Memory & Compute Budget](#6-memory--compute-budget) |
| 7. [Training Curriculum](#7-training-curriculum) |
| 8. [Mobile Deployment Plan](#8-mobile-deployment-plan) |
| 9. [Failure Mode Analysis](#9-failure-mode-analysis) |
| 10. [Ablation Plan](#10-ablation-plan) |
| 11. [Editing Roadmap](#11-editing-roadmap) |
| 12. [Quick Start](#12-quick-start) |
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| --- |
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| ## 1. Architecture Overview |
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| ``` |
| βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ |
| β MicroForge Pipeline β |
| βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ€ |
| β β |
| β Text βββ [Text Encoder (CLIP/TinyCLIP)] βββ text_emb, pooled β |
| β β β |
| β βΌ β |
| β Noise z_T βββ [Recurrent Latent Planner] β |
| β β K=32 plan tokens (49 KB state) β |
| β β READ: cross-attn(plan, z_t) β O(KΒ·N) β |
| β β REASON: self-attn(plan) β O(KΒ²) β |
| β β Self-condition from previous step β |
| β βΌ β |
| β z_t βββ [SSM-Conv Hybrid Backbone] βββ planner_tokens β |
| β β Per block (Γ6/12/18): β |
| β β 1. AdaLN-Group(z_t, t_emb + text_pool) β |
| β β 2. BiSSM(zigzag scan) β O(N) β |
| β β 3. CrossAttn(z_t, text_emb β₯ plan) β O(NΒ·M) β |
| β β 4. FFN(expansion=3) β O(NΒ·D) β |
| β β Every K blocks: SharedMQA(z_t) β single instance β |
| β βΌ β |
| β v_pred = backbone(z_t, t, text, plan) β |
| β z_{t-1} = z_t + Ξt Β· v_pred (Euler ODE step) β |
| β β |
| β z_0 βββ [DC-VAE Decoder (32Γ upsample)] βββ Image [3,H,W] β |
| β β |
| β ββββ Editing Mode (same backbone) βββββββββββββββββββββ β |
| β β z_input = [z_target_noise β₯ z_source] (width-concat) β β |
| β β Task token: [Generate] / [Edit] / [Inpaint] / [SR] β β |
| β β No extra parameters needed β β |
| β ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ β |
| βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ |
| ``` |
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| ### What's Novel |
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| 1. **Recurrent Latent Planner (RLP)**: Persistent latent tokens that carry "memory" across denoising steps. The planner reasons at a higher level before the backbone commits to pixel changes. Inspired by RIN (Jabri et al., 2022) but adapted for diffusion: plan tokens READ from the noised latent, REASON internally via self-attention, then inject guidance into the backbone via cross-attention. Self-conditioning carries plan state across steps. |
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| 2. **SSM-Conv Hybrid Backbone**: Replaces O(NΒ²) self-attention with bidirectional SSM scanning (O(N)) plus local DWConv. One globally-shared lightweight MQA attention block provides in-context learning capability. This hybrid achieves the global receptive field of attention with linear complexity. |
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| 3. **Deep Compression VAE with Residual Shortcuts**: 32Γ spatial compression using space-to-channel rearrangement as non-parametric skip connections. 512px β 16Γ16Γ32 latent = only 256 spatial tokens (vs 4096 in SD-VAE). |
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| 4. **Editing by Design**: DreamLite-style spatial concatenation enables generation, editing, inpainting, and super-resolution with zero extra parameters. The same backbone processes all tasks. |
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| --- |
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| ## 2. Paper Shortlist & Critique |
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| ### A. Efficient Image Generation |
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| | Paper | Problem Solved | What to Borrow | Failure Modes | |
| |-------|---------------|----------------|---------------| |
| | **SANA-Sprint** (2503.09641) | 1-step generation, 0.6B params | Linear DiT + DC-AE latent + sCM+LADD distillation | Text encoder dominates memory | |
| | **SnapGen** (2412.09619) | Mobile T2I, 0.38B, iPhone 15 | Remove SA from high-res, MQA, expanded separable conv | No public weights | |
| | **SnapGen++** (2601.08303) | 360ms/step iPhone, 0.4B | ASSA, elastic supernetwork, tiny VAE | Proprietary | |
| | **DreamLite** (2603.28713) | Mobile gen+edit unified | Spatial concat, task-progressive training | No public weights | |
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| ### B. Subquadratic Backbones |
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| | Paper | Problem Solved | What to Borrow | Failure Modes | |
| |-------|---------------|----------------|---------------| |
| | **DiMSUM** (2411.04168) | Best FID with Mamba, 3Γ faster convergence | Wavelet+Mamba, shared attention block | Complex implementation | |
| | **ZigMa** (2403.13802) | Spatial continuity for SSM | Zigzag-8 scan, heterogeneous layers | Only class-conditional | |
| | **LiT** (2501.12976) | Pure linear DiT | DWConv inside linear attn, weight inheritance | Small quality drop at low res | |
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| ### C. Compact Latent Spaces |
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| | Paper | Problem Solved | What to Borrow | Failure Modes | |
| |-------|---------------|----------------|---------------| |
| | **DC-AE** (2410.10733) | 32-128Γ compression | Residual space-to-channel shortcuts | High-channel needs bigger backbone | |
| | **TiTok** (2406.07550) | 32-128 1D tokens | Break 2D grid, proxy-code VQ | Resolution-fixed | |
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| ### D. Editing Patterns |
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| | Paper | Problem Solved | What to Borrow | Failure Modes | |
| |-------|---------------|----------------|---------------| |
| | **DreamLite** (2603.28713) | Mobile gen+edit | Spatial concat (+14 GenEval vs channel) | Editing data at scale | |
| | **FLUX Kontext** (2506.15742) | Best editing quality | 3D RoPE offset, multi-reference | 12B, not mobile | |
| | **RIN** (2212.11972) | Decoupled computation | Latent tokens + cross-attn, self-cond | Pixel-space only | |
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| --- |
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| ## 3. Module-by-Module Design |
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| ### Module A: Deep Compression VAE (`microforge/vae.py`) |
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| 32Γ spatial compression with space-to-channel residual shortcuts (DC-AE technique). |
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| | Config | Channels | Latent C | Params | FP16 | |
| |--------|----------|----------|--------|------| |
| | tiny | [32,64,128,256] | 16 | 16M | 32 MB | |
| | small | [64,128,256,512] | 32 | 77M | 154 MB | |
| | base | [128,256,512,512] | 32 | 110M | 220 MB | |
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| ### Module B: SSM-Conv Hybrid Backbone (`microforge/backbone.py`) |
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| Bidirectional SSM + local DWConv + one globally-shared MQA attention. |
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| | Config | Depth | Dim | Params | FP16 | |
| |--------|-------|-----|--------|------| |
| | tiny | 6 | 256 | 8M | 16 MB | |
| | small | 12 | 384 | 29M | 58 MB | |
| | base | 18 | 512 | 71M | 142 MB | |
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| ### Module C: Recurrent Latent Planner (`microforge/planner.py`) |
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| 32 persistent plan tokens, 49 KB state per plan. O(KΒ²+KΒ·N) per layer. |
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| ### Module D: Text Encoder (pluggable) |
| - Mobile: TinyCLIP ~60M |
| - Quality: CLIP-L ~428M |
| - Best: Gemma-2-2B ~2B |
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| --- |
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| ## 4. Mathematical Formulation |
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| **Rectified Flow**: z_t = (1-t)Β·z_0 + tΒ·Ξ΅ |
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| **Velocity target**: v* = Ξ΅ - z_0 |
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| **Training loss**: L = E[w(t) Β· ||v_ΞΈ(z_t, t, c) - v*||Β²] where w(t) = 1/(1+|2t-1|) |
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| **Sampling**: z_{t-Ξt} = z_t + Ξt Β· v_ΞΈ(z_t, t, c) |
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| **Planner self-conditioning**: p_t = Ο(w)Β·p_{t+1} + (1-Ο(w))Β·p_init(text) |
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| **CFG**: vΜ = v_β
+ sΒ·(v_c - v_β
) |
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| --- |
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| ## 5. Training Objective |
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| - **Stage 1 (VAE)**: L1 + Ξ»_KLΒ·KL + LPIPS + GAN |
| - **Stage 2-3 (Flow)**: w(t)Β·||v_ΞΈ - v*||Β² |
| - **Stage 4 (KD)**: L_flow + Ξ»_tΒ·Ξ±(t)Β·||v_student - v_teacher||Β² |
| - **Stage 5 (Edit)**: ||v_ΞΈ([z_t|z_src], t, c_edit) - v*||Β² |
| - **Stage 6 (Distill)**: ||f_ΞΈ(z_t, t) - f_{ΞΈβ»}(z_t', t')||Β² |
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| --- |
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| ## 6. Memory & Compute Budget |
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| ### Total System Memory (FP16, no text encoder) |
| - **Tiny**: ~76 MB inference @ 512px |
| - **Small**: ~308 MB inference @ 512px |
| - **Base**: ~530 MB inference @ 512px |
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| With TinyCLIP (+120 MB) β under 500 MB for tiny config. |
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| --- |
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| ## 7. Training Curriculum (16 GB GPU) |
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| | Stage | Freeze | Train | Data | Res | Steps | LR | Time (T4) | |
| |-------|--------|-------|------|-----|-------|----|-----------| |
| | 1. VAE | β | VAE | ImageNet-50K | 128β256 | 50K | 1e-4 | 6h | |
| | 2. Low-Res | VAE | Backbone+Plan | Synthetic 100K | 128β256 | 100K | 1e-4 | 12h | |
| | 3. High-Res | VAE | Backbone+Plan | Same+high-res | 256β512 | 50K | 5e-5 | 8h | |
| | 4. Distill | VAE | Backbone+Plan | Teacher cached | 512 | 30K | 2e-5 | 6h | |
| | 5. Edit | VAE | All (low LR) | IP2P+MagicBrush | 256β512 | 20K | 1e-5 | 4h | |
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| --- |
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| ## 8. Mobile Deployment |
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| 1. Step distill to 4 steps (consistency/LADD) |
| 2. Export ONNX with static shapes |
| 3. INT8 weight quantization |
| 4. Convert to CoreML/NNAPI/QNN |
| 5. Profile on-device |
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| --- |
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| ## 9. Failure Modes |
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| | Failure | Fix | |
| |---------|-----| |
| | SSM scan artifacts | More scan directions + larger DWConv | |
| | Planner collapse | Diversity loss on plan tokens | |
| | VAE blur | Reduce Ξ»_KL + adversarial loss | |
| | Training instability | Grad clip=2.0 + separate SSM LR | |
| | Editing forgetting | Spatial concat + progressive training | |
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| --- |
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| ## 10. Ablation Plan |
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| | ID | Change | Expected | |
| |----|--------|----------| |
| | A1 | No Planner | -2-5% FID | |
| | A2 | Full attention (no SSM) | Better@256, worse@1024, 2-4Γ slower | |
| | A3 | No shared MQA | -1-3% FID | |
| | A4 | No DWConv in SSM | -2-4% FID | |
| | A5 | No self-conditioning | More step jitter | |
| | A6 | Full vs grouped adaLN | +46% params, marginal gain | |
| | A7 | f16 vs f32 vs f64 VAE | f32 sweet spot | |
| | A8 | Spatial vs channel concat | Spatial preserves gen quality | |
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| --- |
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| ## 11. Editing Roadmap |
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| - β
Phase 1: Architecture supports spatial concatenation |
| - Phase 2: Image editing (InstructPix2Pix data) |
| - Phase 3: Inpainting (masked spatial concat) |
| - Phase 4: Super-resolution |
| - Phase 5: Style/reference (add IP-Adapter, +22M params) |
| - Phase 6: Local editing (region-aware planner) |
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| --- |
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| ## 12. Quick Start |
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| ```python |
| import torch |
| from microforge.vae import MicroForgeVAE |
| from microforge.backbone import MicroForgeBackbone |
| from microforge.planner import RecurrentLatentPlanner |
| from microforge.pipeline import MicroForgePipeline, SimpleTextEncoder |
| |
| vae = MicroForgeVAE(config='tiny') |
| backbone = MicroForgeBackbone(latent_channels=16, config='tiny') |
| planner = RecurrentLatentPlanner(num_plan_tokens=16, dim=256, text_dim=768, latent_channels=16) |
| text_enc = SimpleTextEncoder(embed_dim=768, num_layers=2) |
| pipeline = MicroForgePipeline(vae, backbone, text_enc, planner) |
| |
| tokens = torch.randint(0, 8192, (1, 10)) |
| images = pipeline.text2img(tokens, height=256, width=256, num_steps=4) |
| ``` |
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| --- |
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| ## License |
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| MIT License |
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| ## Citation |
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| ```bibtex |
| @software{microforge2025, |
| title={MicroForge: Mobile-First Image Generation with Recurrent Latent Planning}, |
| year={2025}, |
| url={https://huggingface.co/asdf98/microforge} |
| } |
| ``` |
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