ByteDance SeedVR2 distilled to 1.44B, cutting RAM to 4.6 GB for local image upscaling

TimeTruth2490 · reddit · 2026-07-30

A researcher reports distilling ByteDance’s SeedVR2-7B image upscaler into a much smaller 1.44B, 6-layer model called SeedVR2-1.4B.

Highlights:

• The student is about 5.7× smaller on disk and needs about 4.6 GB of RAM versus roughly 14–16 GB for the teacher.
• On an Apple M2 Ultra, it is around 1.6× faster at 4× upscaling and 4.7–5.6× faster at 8× upscaling.
• Quality is measured against the teacher with band-energy metrics and MAE across 15 scenes.
• The author concludes it is best used as a 2×–4× upscaler; 8× works but clearly degrades.
• The model is published on Hugging Face.

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