text-diffusion-fashion-mnist

A text-conditioned diffusion model built from scratch in PyTorch — a miniature Stable Diffusion trained on Fashion-MNIST (32×32 grayscale). A U-Net learns to reverse a Gaussian noising process, conditioned on frozen CLIP text embeddings, and generates a garment image from a caption using classifier-free guidance.

📦 Code / training / full write-up: https://github.com/mbsdeepak/text-diffusion-fashion-mnist

One row per class (t-shirt, trouser, pullover, dress, coat, sandal, shirt, sneaker, bag, ankle boot); each image is generated from pure noise, DDIM 50 steps, guidance 1.5.

What it does

Give it one of the 10 Fashion-MNIST categories and it synthesises a brand-new image of that item from random noise:

"sneaker" ──► [model] ──► a novel 32×32 image of a sneaker

Files

File	Description
model.safetensors	U-Net weights (19.4M params, raw / non-EMA)
config.json	The Config used to build the U-Net

How to load & sample

The architecture is defined in the GitHub repo, so load the weights into it:

git clone https://github.com/mbsdeepak/text-diffusion-fashion-mnist
cd text-diffusion-fashion-mnist
pip install -r requirements.txt
huggingface-cli download mbsdeepak/text-diffusion-fashion-mnist model.safetensors --local-dir .

import torch
from safetensors.torch import load_file
from config import get_config, FASHION_CLASSES
from src.unet import UNet
from src.diffusion import GaussianDiffusion
from src.text_encoder import TextConditioner
from src.data import denormalize
from torchvision.utils import save_image

cfg = get_config()
model = UNet(cfg).to(cfg.device)
model.load_state_dict(load_file("model.safetensors"))
model.eval()

cond = TextConditioner(cfg).to(cfg.device)
diff = GaussianDiffusion(cfg).to(cfg.device)

labels = torch.arange(len(FASHION_CLASSES), device=cfg.device)  # one of each class
imgs = diff.ddim_sample(model, cond, labels)
save_image(denormalize(imgs), "out.png", nrow=len(FASHION_CLASSES))

Training details

• Data: Fashion-MNIST, 32×32, normalized to [-1, 1]
• Objective: ε-prediction MSE (DDPM), cosine noise schedule, T=1000
• Conditioning: frozen CLIP (openai/clip-vit-base-patch32) text embeddings via FiLM + cross-attention; 15% caption dropout for classifier-free guidance
• Trained: 25 epochs on Apple Silicon (MPS), final loss ≈ 0.042
• Sampling: DDIM, 50 steps, guidance scale 1.5 (low guidance — high CFG artifacts on this small, short-trained model)

These are the raw weights, not EMA — for a short (25-epoch) run the EMA average still lags the live weights, so the raw model produces the cleaner samples.

Limitations

• Conditioned on a fixed set of 10 captions, so it's text-driven class-conditional generation, not open-vocabulary text-to-image (the cross-attention plumbing is the same; the dataset is the limit).
• 32×32 grayscale — a learning/portfolio project to understand the method, not photorealism.

References

Ho et al. DDPM (2020) · Nichol & Dhariwal Improved DDPM (2021) · Song et al. DDIM (2021) · Ho & Salimans Classifier-Free Guidance (2022) · Rombach et al. Latent Diffusion (2022).