Cagliostro Research Lab has released Animagine XL 4.0, an anime-focused full-model fine-tune of Stable Diffusion XL 1.0, followed by an optimized Opt checkpoint. The newer variant targets inconsistent anatomy, residual noise, muted saturation, and color drift while retaining the same SDXL architecture and tag-based prompting system.

At publication, the Hugging Face repository had recorded more than 800,000 downloads. That metric counts file requests and may include repeat downloads from the same user. Existing SDXL front ends can load the fp16 SafeTensors weights, although prompt behavior and adapter compatibility differ from vanilla SDXL and earlier Animagine releases.

Two checkpoints, different jobs

Version 4.0 started from SDXL 1.0 and updated the UNet and text encoders on 8.4 million anime-style images. Updating the core weights produces larger behavioral changes than adding a LoRA, including stronger character knowledge and closer adherence to Danbooru-style tags.

The Opt checkpoint keeps the same architecture while refining the initial release. Cagliostro reports more consistent generations, improved body proportions, fewer artifacts, richer saturation, and more accurate colors. Opt is the practical choice for new integrations; the original checkpoint remains useful when reproducing images or workflows built against the first 4.0 release.

Inside a 2,650 GPU-hour run

The model card reports the following training configuration: