GLM-Image — Core AI
ZhipuAI's GLM-Image (16B, MIT) converted to Core AI for on-device image generation on Apple Silicon (macOS 27+) — the zoo's first autoregressive + diffusion hybrid.
GLM-Image generates in two stages: a 9B GLM-4 autoregressive model writes the image as a grid of discrete visual prior tokens (sampled left-to-right like an LLM, ~36 tok/s on M4 Max), and a 7B flow-matching DiT denoises the actual pixels conditioned on those tokens, followed by a 16-channel VAE decode. Both native 1024×1024 and a faster 512×512 variant are included.
macOS only. The AR (9.6 GB) + DiT (9.2 GB) weights are resolution-independent, so the 512 variant is no smaller — an iPhone port needs int4 + sequential component loading.
Components
| Component | Description | Size |
|---|---|---|
glm_image_ar.aimodelc |
GLM-4-9B visual-token AR decoder (int8, S=1 decode, AOT h16c GPU) | 9.6 GB |
glm_image_dit_1024.aimodelc |
30-block flow-matching DiT, 1024² (int8, AOT h16c GPU) | 9.2 GB |
glm_image_dit_512.aimodelc |
Same DiT exported at 512² | 9.2 GB |
glm_image_vae_1024.aimodel |
16ch AutoencoderKL decoder, 1024² (fp32, CPU) | 0.9 GB |
glm_image_vae_512.aimodel |
Same VAE exported at 512² | 0.9 GB |
tokenizer/ |
GLM tokenizer (vocab 168 064; visual tokens < 16 512) | — |
ehs.f32 |
Empty-glyph text embedding [1×1×1472] — the DiT text input for glyph-free prompts (no T5 needed at runtime) | 6 KB |
Weights are int8 (per-block-32) for AR/DiT; the VAE stays fp32 (fp16 overflows its activations). Compute precision float16 on GPU. One resolution needs ~19.7 GB on disk (AR + one DiT + one VAE).
Usage
Sample app (easiest)
CoreAIImageGen (macOS)
— run the CoreAIImageGenMac scheme, pick GLM-Image 1024 (AR+diffusion) from the model
menu, tap Download & Load, type a prompt, Generate.
- Steps 20 (default) ≈ 4.5 min/image on M4 Max — reference quality
- Steps 12 ≈ 2.5 min — nearly indistinguishable
- The 512 variant generates in ~1 min
The AR stage is sampled (temperature 0.9 / top-p 0.75, the upstream generation_config),
so re-rolling the seed meaningfully changes composition.
Pipeline contract (build your own)
The hybrid does not fit Apple's high-level CoreAIDiffusionPipeline; the host loop is
~300 lines of Swift (see the app's GlmImagePipeline):
- AR:
tokenize(prompt) + fixed grid suffix→ S=1 prefill/decode with host-computed 3D-mRoPE cos/sin → sample visual tokens → 2× upsample the large grid →prior[1, N](N = 1024 @512, 4096 @1024). - DiT: 20-step CFG (guidance 1.5,
prior_scale1/0 for cond/uncond). Condition the DiT on the raw integer scheduletrunc(linspace(1000,1,steps+1)) − 1; step the latent with the mu-shifted sigmasσ' = μ/(μ + (1/σ − 1)), μ = 0.75·side/256 + 0.25. - VAE (fp32, CPU): latent → RGB.
⚠️ Feeding the DiT the shifted timesteps (sigma×1000) instead of the raw schedule skews the adaLN time conditioning every step and drifts colors — resolution-dependently (mild at 512, strong at 1024). This is the one non-obvious contract in the port.
Limitations
- Glyph rendering (text in images) is not wired: prompts containing quoted text
(
'…',"…",「…」) route through a T5 glyph encoder that is not part of this bundle. Keep prompts glyph-free. - Negative prompts are a no-op (GLM's CFG drops the prior tokens instead).
- Image-to-image / editing (
GlmImageKVCache) not yet exported.
Quality
Verified against the bf16 diffusers reference: DiT single-forward cosine 0.9999, VAE
byte-exact, AR prior-injection reproduces the reference composition; end-to-end output is
visually on par with GlmImagePipeline at the same step count.
License
MIT (inherited from zai-org/GLM-Image).
Model tree for mlboydaisuke/GLM-Image-CoreAI
Base model
zai-org/GLM-Image