xkcd-artist: a 1.72MB browser model plans stick-figure comics in 0.55ms
init0 · reddit · 2026-11-11
Developer hemanth trained and quantized xkcd-artist, a tiny 1.72MB Int8 ONNX model that runs in-browser via WASM SIMD with a 0.55ms P50, generating xkcd-style stick-figure comics, charts, and flowcharts.
Key idea: separate neural stage planning from procedural vector ink and lettering, sidestepping diffusion models' chronic garbled speech-bubble text.
- The planner was trained on an NVIDIA L4 with 226 speech-masked xkcd panels plus 891 ExplainXKCD dialogues; it predicts panel count, props, 12-DOF stick-figure poses, and pen wobble
- A procedural SVG compositor renders monochrome wobbled strokes, curved speaker leader lines, and crisp xkcd-script dialogue
- The deadpan generator covers 138+ unique strips, charts, and flowcharts, with 98.33% skeleton uniqueness across 120 prompts (B=1,000 bootstrap eval)
Fully local with zero cloud calls; weights on Hugging Face, MIT-licensed code on GitHub, installable via npm/pip.
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