PixAI launches Tsubaki.3 and opens its anime tagging model

PixAI has released Tsubaki.3, an in-house anime AI model that spans illustration, manga pages and video, while also publishing a technical report on how it was built and why style diversity matters. The company is pairing the launch with open-source Tagger 1.0 and anniversary offers as it pushes creators to move across formats without changing models.

Why it matters: - PixAI is betting that anime-specific AI needs specialized training, not general-purpose image generation. - The launch targets creators who want to keep the same character and style consistent across illustration, manga and video. - The open-source release of Tagger 1.0 gives researchers a tagging tool built for anime workflows.

What happened: - PixAI released Tsubaki.3, an all-in-one anime creation model for illustration, manga pages and video. - The model was built from scratch by PixAI rather than fine-tuned from a public base model. - PixAI also published a technical report explaining how Tsubaki.3 was built and evaluated. - The company open-sourced Tagger 1.0, the anime tagging model used in its data pipeline. - PixAI says the platform has more than 16 million users worldwide.

The details: - Tsubaki.3 handles text-to-image generation and in-context generation in one system. - Creators can edit part of an existing image while leaving the rest unchanged. - The model can use a reference image to carry over a character, pose, expression, sketch, page layout or style. - A single reference image can produce expression sheets, multiple angles, outfit changes and age variants while keeping character identity consistent. - The model can work step by step from line art to grayscale to flat color to finished artwork. - Tsubaki.3 can generate production materials such as three-view character sheets, pose references and perspective roughs. - Natural-language edits can change hair color, hand poses, props or text inside an image. - The model can turn an illustration into a manga page with panel layouts, speech bubbles, dialogue, screentone and action camera angles. - Tsubaki.3 renders on-image text in Japanese, Chinese, English and Korean. - The model can generate video from text. - It can also generate video from existing illustrations or manga panels. - PixAI says the video tools can add facial expressions, hair movement, action and camera work while keeping the same character and art style. - The company says the goal is to let creators move between illustration, manga and video without switching models.

Between the lines: - The technical report frames anime generation as a distinct problem because the medium uses many styles, character designs and visual conventions that do not map cleanly to plain-English prompts. - PixAI says Tsubaki.3 was trained to preserve those distinctions instead of averaging them away. - The report says roughly 500 million raw image-text pairs were reduced to about 50 million through quality filtering, deduplication, recaptioning and concept balancing. - PixAI used SigLip-Anime, a version of SigLIP 2 SO400M fine-tuned on deduplicated public anime data, for the pipeline. - The report also addresses style collapse, which it describes as reinforcement learning pushing image models toward a single bland look. - After supervised fine-tuning on about 7,000 human-curated images, PixAI used a two-stage approach that first corrected anatomy, multi-subject scenes, character interaction and text rendering, then optimized for illustration quality. - Prompt Helper translates short, casual prompts, often written in Japanese or Korean, into more detailed descriptions while keeping explicit user choices unchanged. - PixAI said in a statement that transparency helps AI creation tools earn trust. - Tagger 1.0 labels anime images with 30,877 tags covering characters, series, styles and visual attributes. - Built on the SAM 3 image backbone, Tagger 1.0 improves character tagging accuracy by 10.4 micro-F1 points over the previous version. - Tagger 1.0 is free for research and development use on Hugging Face.

What's next: - Tsubaki.3 is available now on PixAI. - PixAI's 4th anniversary promotion runs through October 20, 2026. - Users receive a free Tsubaki.3 trial card on login during the anniversary event. - Premium members can generate with Tsubaki.3 from text without spending credits during the promotion. - Annual plans are 50% off during the anniversary period. - PixAI directs users to the 4th anniversary event page for details. - The company says its broader product lineup also includes Mio.2, PixAI Edit Pro and PixAI Studio.