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MLX native implementations of state-of-the-art generative image models

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MFLUX MLX CI

About

Run the latest state-of-the-art generative image models locally on your Mac in native MLX!

Table of contents


πŸ’‘ Philosophy

MFLUX is a line-by-line MLX port of several state-of-the-art generative image models from the Huggingface Diffusers and Huggingface Transformers libraries. All models are implemented from scratch in MLX, using only tokenizers from the Huggingface Transformers library. MFLUX is purposefully kept minimal and explicit, @karpathy style.


πŸ’Ώ Installation

If you haven't already, install uv, then run:

uv tool install --upgrade mflux

After installation, the following command shows all available MFLUX CLI commands:

uv tool list 

To generate your first image using, for example, the z-image-turbo model, run

mflux-generate-z-image-turbo \
  --prompt "A puffin standing on a cliff" \
  --width 1280 \
  --height 500 \
  --seed 42 \
  --steps 9 \
  -q 8

Puffin

The first time you run this, the model will automatically download which can take some time. See the model section for the different options and features, and the common README for shared CLI patterns and examples.

Python API

Create a standalone generate.py script with inline uv dependencies:

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.10"
# dependencies = [
#   "mflux",
# ]
# ///
from mflux.models.z_image import ZImageTurbo

model = ZImageTurbo(quantize=8)
image = model.generate_image(
    prompt="A puffin standing on a cliff",
    seed=42,
    num_inference_steps=9,
    width=1280,
    height=500,
)
image.save("puffin.png")

Run it with:

uv run generate.py

For more Python API inspiration, look at the CLI entry points for the respective models.

⚠️ Troubleshooting: hf_transfer error

If you encounter a ValueError: Fast download using 'hf_transfer' is enabled (HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=1) but 'hf_transfer' package is not available, you can install MFLUX with the hf_transfer package included:

uv tool install --upgrade mflux --with hf_transfer

This will enable faster model downloads from Hugging Face.

DGX / NVIDIA (uv tool install)
uv tool install --python 3.13 mflux

🎨 Models

MFLUX supports the following model families. They have different strengths and weaknesses; see each model’s README for full usage details.

Model Release date Size Type Description
Z-Image Nov 2025 6B Distilled Best all-rounder: fast, small, very good quality and realism.
FLUX.2 Jan 2026 4B & 9B Distilled Fastest + smallest with very good qaility and edit capabilities.
FIBO Oct 2025 8B Base Very good JSON-based prompt understanding and editability, medium speed
SeedVR2 Jun 2025 3B β€” Best upscaling model.
Qwen Image Aug 2025+ 20B Base Large model (slower); strong prompt understanding and world knowledge. Has edit capabilities
Depth Pro Oct 2024 β€” β€” Very fast and accurate depth estimation model from Apple.
FLUX.1 Aug 2024 12B Distilled & Base Legacy option with decent quality. Has edit capabilities with 'Kontext' model and upscaling support via ControlNet

✨ Features

General

  • Quantization and local model loading
  • LoRA support (multi-LoRA, scales, library lookup)
  • Metadata export + reuse, plus prompt file support

Model-specific highlights

  • Text-to-image and image-to-image generation.
  • In-context editing, multi-image editing, and virtual try-on
  • ControlNet (Canny), depth conditioning, fill/inpainting, and Redux
  • Upscaling (SeedVR2 and Flux ControlNet)
  • LoRA finetuning using the Dreambooth technique
  • Depth map extraction and FIBO prompt tooling (VLM inspire/refine)

See the common README for detailed usage and examples, and use the model section above to browse specific models and capabilities.

Note

As MFLUX supports a wide variety of CLI tools and options, the easiest way to navigate the CLI in 2026 is to use a coding agent (like Cursor, Claude Code, or similar). Ask questions like: β€œCan you help me generate an image using z-image?”


🌱 Related projects


πŸ™ Acknowledgements

MFLUX would not be possible without the great work of:


βš–οΈ License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.