MicroAST

MicroAST is the "super-fast, ultra-resolution" entry in ComfyUI-StyleTransferPlus - a 2023 AAAI paper whose entire selling point is that it's tiny and fast enough to stylize images far bigger than the rest of this pack comfortably handles. If Neural Neighbor is the patient painter and CAST is the quick sketch, MicroAST is the one you point at a large image and don't babysit.

It's non-diffusion arbitrary style transfer like everything here: content image + style image in, stylized image out, no prompt or sampler. What's different is the architecture. Most feed-forward style transfer runs the style through the whole network alongside the content at every layer. MicroAST deliberately separates those: a heavy content encoder that doesn't look at the style at all, a lightweight style encoder, and a "modulator" that encodes the style once, up front, then adjusts the decoder's weights for that single style. Because the style isn't re-processed at every resolution and the content encoder is shared, it scales to ultra-resolution much cheaper than you'd expect.

Inputs and outputs

Lean interface - the README says "similar to EFDM" but in the node that translates to just the basics:

• src_img / style_img - content and style.
• size - square edge length after resizing (default 512). Push this higher; this is the node where high size is the point.
• do_crop - resize-then-center-crop to square instead of squishing.

Output: res_img (IMAGE) → Preview/Save. Note there's no style_strength knob exposed here, unlike EFDM - the style is applied at full strength.

Install

Pack install is the usual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/FuouM/ComfyUI-StyleTransferPlus

or ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyUI-StyleTransferPlus → install → restart.

Models are four files, all from the MicroAST repo's models folder, all placed inside the pack:

ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI-StyleTransferPlus/models/microast/content_encoder_iter_160000.pth.tar
ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI-StyleTransferPlus/models/microast/style_encoder_iter_160000.pth.tar
ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI-StyleTransferPlus/models/microast/decoder_iter_160000.pth.tar
ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI-StyleTransferPlus/models/microast/modulator_iter_160000.pth.tar

That's the classic MicroAST trap: it's four separate checkpoints and the node won't load if any one is missing or misnamed. Don't rename them, don't move them to your global ComfyUI/models folder.

Common issues

• Load error on first run - one of the four .pth.tar files is missing or not exactly where shown above. This is the #1 problem with this node.
• OOM at huge size - it's efficient, not magic. Back it off a bit.
• Style comes on too strong, no way to dial it - correct; no strength input exists here. Match with EFDM or color-match first with Coral Color Transfer if you need more control.

It's a lightweight node that's genuinely good at what it's named for - big images, fast. Worth a slot in any "stylize at print resolution" workflow.