Citron Anima LoRA Trainer

Overview

Citron's Anima LoRA Trainer (app.py = "🍋 Citron's Anima LoRA Trainer") is a local Gradio UI for training LoRA adapters on the Anima diffusion model using kohya-ss/sd-scripts. It trains on ~6GB VRAM with the default settings — same low-VRAM profile as Anima generation.

• Created by Citron Legacy; UI repo: https://github.com/citronlegacy/citron-anima-lora-trainer-ui. The Aitrepreneur adaptive installers clone the fork https://github.com/aitrepreneur/citron-anima-lora-trainer-ui.
• Training backend: kohya-ss/sd-scripts (https://github.com/kohya-ss/sd-scripts), launched via accelerate launch.
• Trains LoRAs for Anima DiT (Cosmos-2B). Uses Anima's own components: DiT weights + Qwen3-0.6B text encoder + Qwen-Image VAE.
• Output: standard .safetensors LoRA usable directly in the anima-base ComfyUI workflow.

Network module is networks.lora_anima and the training script is sd-scripts/anima_train_network.py (an Anima-specific kohya script the installer expects). Confirm these exist after the installer's git clone of sd-scripts — they are referenced by app.py but pulled from the upstream repo at install time.

Setup

Windows

Run CITRON_ANIMA_LORA_TRAINER-V2.bat. It:

1. Ensures Git and Python 3.10 (via winget if missing).
2. Detects the NVIDIA GPU/driver and picks a matching PyTorch CUDA wheel automatically:
   • Blackwell (RTX 50xx) → cu128, bf16
   • Modern (RTX 20/30/40, etc.) → cu128/cu126/cu118 by driver, bf16 (fp16 on Turing)
   • Pascal/Maxwell (GTX 10/9xx) → cu126/cu118, fp16
   • Kepler/older → unsupported
3. Clones the UI repo, patches app.py defaults (base_model → anima-preview3-base, mixed_precision → detected value), writes app_configs/accelerate_gpu.yaml.
4. Creates .venv, installs PyTorch, clones+installs sd-scripts, installs app requirements.txt.
5. Downloads models into models/anima/{dit,text_encoder,vae}/ from https://huggingface.co/circlestone-labs/Anima/resolve/main/split_files/...:
   • dit/anima-base-v1.0.safetensors (~4GB)
   • text_encoder/qwen_3_06b_base.safetensors (~1.19GB)
   • vae/qwen_image_vae.safetensors (~254MB)
6. Writes and launches run_anima_base_windows.bat.

RunPod / Linux

Run CITRON_ANIMA_LORA_TRAINER-RUNPOD-V2.sh. Same flow into /workspace/citron-anima-lora-trainer-ui; patches server_name to 0.0.0.0; expose HTTP port 7860 and open Connect → HTTP Service 7860 (or https://${RUNPOD_POD_ID}-7860.proxy.runpod.net).

Launch

app.py runs Gradio on 0.0.0.0:7860 → open http://127.0.0.1:7860. Re-launch later with run_anima_base_windows.bat (Win) or ./run_anima_base_runpod.sh (RunPod). The DiT base model auto-downloads on first "Start Training" if not already present (uses wget).

Dataset preparation

A flat folder of images, each with a matching .txt caption of the same basename (image-side captioning, kohya style):

my_dataset/
  001.png      001.txt
  002.jpg      002.txt
  ...

• Accepted images: .jpg .jpeg .png .webp .bmp .gif.
• Captions are Danbooru-style tags / natural language (same prompt style as Anima generation). The trainer warns about any image missing a .txt.
• caption_extension = .txt; shuffle_caption = false; caption_dropout_rate default 0.1 (set per dataset).

The UI tab "Training" takes Image Directory (the flat folder above) and Output Directory (where the LoRA is saved). "Configure Training" validates the dataset, prints a step estimate (steps_per_epoch = ceil(images × repeats / (batch × grad_accum)), total = spe × epochs), then writes two TOMLs into configs/.

Key training parameters (defaults from app.py)

Basic

Advanced

Fixed in the generated training TOML (not exposed): network_module = networks.lora_anima, network_train_unet_only = true, qwen3_max_token_length = 512, t5_max_token_length = 512, save_model_as = safetensors, save_precision = bf16 (fp16 on older GPUs).

Generated config files

configs/<project>_training_<timestamp>.toml — references the DiT (pretrained_model_name_or_path), qwen3 text encoder, and vae paths from models/anima/, plus all params above.

configs/<project>_dataset_<timestamp>.toml:

[general]
resolution = 768
enable_bucket = true
bucket_no_upscale = false
bucket_reso_steps = 64
min_bucket_reso = 256
max_bucket_reso = 4096

[[datasets]]
resolution = 768
[[datasets.subsets]]
num_repeats = 10
image_dir = "/path/to/my_dataset"
caption_extension = ".txt"
caption_dropout_rate = 0.1

The sd-scripts command

"Start Training" runs (streaming logs live to the UI and to logs/<project>_<timestamp>.log):

accelerate launch \
  --config_file app_configs/accelerate_gpu.yaml \
  --num_cpu_threads_per_process 1 \
  --gpu_ids 0 \
  sd-scripts/anima_train_network.py \
  --config_file  configs/<project>_training_<timestamp>.toml \
  --dataset_config configs/<project>_dataset_<timestamp>.toml

accelerate_gpu.yaml pins use_cpu: false, mixed_precision: <bf16|fp16>, single process/machine. CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES is set to the selected GPU index.

Output & using the LoRA

• The trained LoRA is saved to your Output Directory as <project_name>.safetensors (plus per-epoch checkpoints, last save_last_n_epochs kept).
• Copy it into ComfyUI models/loras/ and load it in the anima-base workflow via LoraLoaderModelOnly (or rgthree Power Lora Loader):

  { "class_type": "LoraLoaderModelOnly",
    "inputs": { "model": ["<unet>", 0], "lora_name": "<project_name>.safetensors", "strength_model": 1.0 } }
  

• Use the same prompt style you captioned with. Typical strength 0.7–1.0; stack with the turbo LoRA for fast 12-step generation.

VRAM & tips

• Defaults train on ~6GB VRAM (network_dim 32, res 768, batch 1, gradient checkpointing + latent/TE caching).
• OOM? The trainer suggests network_dim=8 and/or resolution=512. Also keep batch 1 and use AdamW8bit.
• GTX 1060 6GB works but is slow; 3GB cards are not realistic. Older-than-Pascal GPUs are unsupported.
• Step count rule of thumb: images × repeats × epochs / (batch × grad_accum). The UI prints the exact estimate before you train.
• Logs stream to the UI and logs/. Training config + last paths persist in config.json so you can re-run.

Unverified / verify before relying

• sd-scripts/anima_train_network.py and networks.lora_anima come from the kohya fork pulled at install time — present per app.py's expectations but not in the local downloaded files here.
• Exact LoRA output filename is <project_name>.safetensors per output_name; confirm in your Output Directory after a run.