# NanoFLUX: Distillation-Driven Compression of Large Text-to-Image Generation Models for Mobile Devices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06879 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06879/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 37 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05135/) (2024)
- [Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22699/) (2025)
- [SnapFusion: Text-to-Image Diffusion Model on Mobile Devices within Two Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00980/) (2023)
- [Token Merging for Fast Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17604/) (2023)
- [Understanding and Improving Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07013/) (2019)
- [HPSv3: Towards Wide-Spectrum Human Preference Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03789/) (2025)
- [DepGraph: Towards Any Structural Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12900/) (2023)
- [Towards Faster and Stabilized GAN Training for High-fidelity Few-shot Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04775/) (2021)
- [FORA: Fast-Forward Caching in Diffusion Transformer Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01425/) (2024)
- [DiTFastAttn: Attention Compression for Diffusion Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08552/) (2024)
- [SANA-Sprint: One-Step Diffusion with Continuous-Time Consistency Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09641/) (2025)
- [OneIG-Bench: Omni-dimensional Nuanced Evaluation for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07977/) (2025)
- [LD-Pruner: Efficient Pruning of Latent Diffusion Models using Task-Agnostic Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11936/) (2024)
- [U-DiTs: Downsample Tokens in U-Shaped Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02730/) (2024)
- [TinyFusion: Diffusion Transformers Learned Shallow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01199/) (2024)
- [MobileDiffusion: Instant Text-to-Image Generation on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16567/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Token-wise Feature Caching: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Dual Feature Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18911/) (2024)
- [Importance-Based Token Merging for Efficient Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16720/) (2024)
- [Layer- and Timestep-Adaptive Differentiable Token Compression Ratios for Efficient Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16822/) (2024)
- [DiTFastAttnV2: Head-wise Attention Compression for Multi-Modality Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22796/) (2025)
- [ToMA: Token Merge with Attention for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10918/) (2025)
- [CAT Pruning: Cluster-Aware Token Pruning For Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00433/) (2025)
- [Neodragon: Mobile Video Generation using Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06055/) (2025)
- [MosaicDiff: Training-free Structural Pruning for Diffusion Model Acceleration Reflecting Pretraining Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11962/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While large-scale text-to-image diffusion models continue to improve in visual quality, their increasing scale has widened the gap between state-of-the-art models and on-device solutions. To address this gap, we introduce NanoFLUX, a 2.4B text-to-image flow-matching model distilled from 17B FLUX.1-Schnell using a progressive compression pipeline designed to preserve generation quality. Our contributions include: (1) A model compression strategy driven by pruning redundant components in the diffusion transformer, reducing its size from 12B to 2B; (2) A ResNet-based token downsampling mechanism that reduces latency by allowing intermediate blocks to operate on lower-resolution tokens while preserving high-resolution processing elsewhere; (3) A novel text encoder distillation approach that leverages visual signals from early layers of the denoiser during sampling. Empirically, NanoFLUX generates 512 x 512 images in approximately 2.5 seconds on mobile devices, demonstrating the feasibility of high-quality on-device text-to-image generation.