Textual Inversion

What is Textual Inversion?

Textual Inversion allows you to train a tiny part of the neural network on your own pictures, and use results when generating new ones.

The result of training is a .pt or a .bin file (former is the format used by original author, latter is by the diffusers library).

See original site for more details about what textual inversion is: https://textual-inversion.github.io/.

Using pre-trained embeddings

Put the embedding into the embeddings directory and use its filename in the prompt. You don't have to restart the program for this to work.

As an example, here is an embedding of Usada Pekora I trained on WD1.2 model, on 53 pictures (119 augmented) for 19500 steps, with 8 vectors per token setting.

Pictures it generates:

portrait of usada pekora
Steps: 20, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 4077357776, Size: 512x512, Model hash: 45dee52b

You can combine multiple embeddings in one prompt:

portrait of usada pekora, mignon
Steps: 20, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 4077357776, Size: 512x512, Model hash: 45dee52b

Be very careful about which model you are using with your embeddings: they work well with the model you used during training, and not so well on different models. For example, here is the above embedding and vanilla 1.4 stable diffusion model:

portrait of usada pekora
Steps: 20, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 4077357776, Size: 512x512, Model hash: 7460a6fa

Training embeddings

Textual inversion tab

Experimental support for training embeddings in user interface.

• create a new empty embedding, select directory with images, train the embedding on it
• the feature is very raw, use at own risk
• i was able to reproduce results I got with other repos in training anime artists as styles, after few tens of thousands steps
• works with half precision floats, but needs experimentation to see if results will be just as good
• if you have enough memory, safer to run with --no-half --precision full
• no preprocessing is done for images (except for resizing to 512x512), not even flip
• planned: another button for UI to run preprocessing for images automatically.
• you can interrupt and resume training without any loss of data (except for AdamW optimization parameters, but it seems none of existing repos save those anyway so the general opinion is they are not important)
• no support for batch sizes or gradient accumulation
• it should not be possible to run this with --lowvram and --medvram flags.

Explanation for parameters

Creating an embedding

• Name: filename for the created embedding. You will also use this text in prompts when referring to the embedding.
• Initialization text: the embedding you create will initially be filled with vectors of this text. If you create a one vector embedding named "zzzz1234" with "tree" as initialization text, and use it in prompt without training, then prompt "a zzzz1234 by monet" will produce same pictures as "a tree by monet".
• Number of vectors per token: the size of embedding. The larger this value, the more information about subject you can fit into the embedding, but also the more words it will take away from your prompt allowance. With stable diffusion, you have a limit of 75 tokens in the prompt. If you use an embedding with 16 vectors in a prompt, that will leave you with space for 75 - 16 = 59. Also from my experience, the larger the number of vectors, the more pictures you need to obtain good results.

Training an embedding

• Embedding: select the embedding you want to train from this dropdown.
• Learning rate: how fast should the training go. The danger with setting parameter to high value is that you may break the embedding if you se it too high. If you see Loss: nan in the training info textbox, that means you failed and the embedding is dead. With the default value, this should not happen.
• Dataset directory: directory with images for training. They all must be square.
• Log directory: sample images and copies of partially trained embeddings will be written to this directory.
• Prompt template file: text file with prompts, one per line, for training the model on. See files in directory textual_inversion_templates for what you can do with those. Following tags can be used in the file:
  • [name]: the name of embedding
  • [filewords]: words from the file name of the image from the dataset, separated by spaces.
• Max steps: training will reach after this many steps have been completed. A step is when one picture (or one batch of pictures, but batches are currently not supported) is shown to the model and is used to improve embedding.

Third party repos

I successfully trained embeddings using those repositories:

• nicolai256
• lstein

Other options are to train on colabs and/or using diffusers library, which I know nothing about.

Finding embeddings online

• huggingface concepts library - a lot of different embeddings, but mostly useless.
• 16777216c - NSFW, anime artist styles by a mysterious stranger.
• cattoroboto - some anime embeddings by anon.
• viper1 - NSFW, furry girls.
• anon's embeddings - NSFW, anime artists.
• rentry - a page with links to embeddings from many sources.