WaifuXL

Notice

We're currently nearing the end of a full rewrite of the website (you as a user shouldn't notice much, but the code is much cleaner and more maintainable), you can check out the updated version at https://de-spaghetti.waifuxl.pages.dev/. After that we will be working on Desktop GPU/CPU acceleration so users can upscale larger images faster (maybe even videos, depends on the performance we can get out of the model). Some things we're considering for acceleration are PyTorch 2.0 model compilation, ONNX, and AITemplate. When that's available we'll put an announcement on the website.

Check out a full write-up here!
WaifuXL is a state of the art super resolution model trained on ~1,200,000 anime style images from the Danbooru2021 dataset. You cant find it online at https://waifuxl.com/. Note that while you can upscale natural (real) images, the model was only trained on anime style drawings, so dont expect to have your socks blown off.

Comparison to Waifu2x

In general, the Real-ESRGAN will outperform the models used on waifu2x by a significant margin, without the need for multiple models trained on various noise reduction levels.

How it Works

Using the Onnx Runtime, we stream the weights of our ML models directly onto your device to be executed locally in WebAssembly. Doing so allows us to provide this service solely through a static webpage, no backend for model execution needed. This has the added benefit of enabling the privacy of your images--your images are not, and never will be, sent to us.

Models

For our super resolution network we are using the state-of-the-art Real-ESRGAN and for our image tagging network we are using a MobileNetV3. Both were trained on a subset of Danbooru2021.

Site

Onnx Runtime is multithreaded and supports SIMD instructions--while upscaling on a phone or a laptop is suprisingly quick, using a beefier computer will bring noticable benefits. We're hosted on Cloudflare Pages which provides unlimited bandwidth. The site is written in React with Next.js and TailwindCSS.

Running Locally

If you'd like to run locally, this should get you started:

git clone https://github.com/TheFutureGadgetsLab/WaifuXL
cd WaifuXL
git checkout de_spaghetti
npm i
npm run dev

A few notes:

The main branch no longer works for some reason. We've been doing a full rewrite for a while in the de_spaghetti branch, hence the checkout above.
Multithreading is hard to do locally because of Spectre. You can get multithreading working by making sure Google Chrome is closed, then launching it from the command line with the following argument: --enable-features=SharedArrayBuffer
After the website rewrite, we will be working on GPU accelerated versions of WaifuXL using PyTorch, ONNX Runtime, or AITemplate. Once this is done it will need to be run locally on your own computer, but the performance uplift should be significant.

Contribution Guide

Code / Site

We're definitely open to code contributions, whether it be code cleanup, new features, or bugfixes. Simply open a discussion so we all can collaborate and discuss the merit of your ideas!

Ideas

We have plenty of things we'd like to add to WaifuXL, if you have a suggestion simply open a discussion and we can start talking! Here are a few things we have in mind:

Style Transfer so you can apply an anime style to real images.
Easter eggs. We have a tagger that can match thousands of tags, maybe we can have something like a cool fireworks effect if you upscale a top-tier waifu (i.e. Truck-kun).

Donations

We're open to donations, just head to https://waifuxl.com/donate and see the ways you can contribute. We want to make it clear that we are providing this service to you, free of cost, because it is free of cost to us. We have no backend and Cloudflare Pages provides unlimited bandwidth for free. Please don't feel obligated to donate even if you find yourself using this service frequently.

On top of donations, we're open to compute contributions (GPU's). We'd like to train a better tagger and continue to update the super resolution model as new SOTA models are published. We'd also like to train a model on natural (real images) so we can upscale more than drawings, and maybe a style transfer model. All of this takes a lot of compute which we simply dont have. If you have the means and you're feeling generous, drop us a line.

isuruwa/WaifuXL