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 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 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

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

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.

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

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.