Rename "Guidance scale" to "CFG scale" with <abbr> tag

[ssokolow]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When I first started using Easy Diffusion, I wanted to start my experiments by replicating results on Civitai and then experimenting with tweaks from that starting point. As someone with no prior Stable Diffusion experience, it took me an inordinately long time to figure out what Easy Diffusion calls certain settings and where it keeps them, with "CFG scale" being one.

Describe the solution you'd like

Instead of the vague and different "Guidance scale" (guidance of what? for what?), use <abbr title="Classifier-Free Guidance">CFG</abbr> Scale and make sure <abbr> still has the dotted underline it gets by default.

This will harmonize it with the name used elsewhere, making learning materials written with another distribution in mind more accessible to Easy Diffusion users while still providing access to what "CFG" means for those who want to know. As an added benefit, it makes the full name of the parameter available without needing to search.

Describe alternatives you've considered I considered leaving "Guidance Scale" as-is and putting "CFG Scale" in a tooltip, but that doesn't make as much logical sense and putting an abbreviation in a tooltip doesn't have the first-class support that <abbr> offers for going the other way. It also doesn't solve the problem of people skim-reading, looking for "CFG".

I also considered adding a question mark icon, but I don't think that would have helped because I wasn't looking for what "Guidance Scale" meant, I was scanning through Image Settings looking for the string "CFG scale" or at least the acronym "CFG".

[glor]

Just a note: Neither CFG nor Guidance scale explain themselves. An (i) icon would help with that.

[ssokolow]

True, but I'm suggesting the rename to resolve the "Where the heck is CFG scale!?[/frustrated]" problem with following basically every piece of learning material I've encountered so far.

Having to hover over every (i) icon in the UI to figure out which one is CFG scale, assuming you don't just pre-emptively conclude it's not there, is sub-optimal to put it mildly.

[fdwr]

guidance of what? for what?

The "guidance scale" (or if you want the overly long term "classifier free guidance scale") guides the image in the direction away from the negative prompt and guides toward the positive prompt.

making learning materials ... more accessible

If your goal is to make learning materials more accessible to beginners, then avoiding cryptic acronyms like CFG would be a good start. If anything, wouldn't it be a nicer outcome to petition Civitai and A1111 to change cryptic "CFG" to "Guidance"?

[ssokolow]

The "guidance scale" (or if you want the overly long term "classifier free guidance scale") guides the image in the direction away from the negative prompt and guides toward the positive prompt.

"guidance of what? for what?" is what users like me said when we looked at the UI for the first time. Telling me here doesn't solve the problem because there's no easy way for future questioners to get from there to here.

If your goal is to make learning materials more accessible to beginners, then avoiding cryptic acronyms like CFG would be a good start. If anything, wouldn't it be a nicer outcome to petition Civitai and A1111 to change cryptic "CFG" to "Guidance"?

Guidance and CFG are both cryptonyms without additional online help, like a tooltip or (i) button, and I don't think there's a non-cryptonym good enough and short enough to be displayed as the field's label, but CFG is more compatible with people wanting to follow instructions written with automatic1111 in mind.

[fdwr]

without additional online help, like a tooltip ... Guidance and CFG are both cryptonyms

Yeah, extra information is prudent for both the even more confusing A1111 term (what the flip is "CFG", said the first time user??) and Easy Diffusion. Want to open an A1111 issue here?

Note in the actual math, the balance between the positive and negative prompt guides the prediction further along each iteration, either more strictly (more to the positive weight) or less strictly (to the negative weight):

negativeWeight = 1 - positiveWeight; // e.g. 7.5 positive weight yields -6.5 negative weight
...
predictedNoise[i] = predictedNoise[i] * positiveWeight
                  + predictedNoise[i + secondBatch] * negativeWeight;

Personally I always found the term "classifier free guidance" to be a mouthful, which is a nice lengthy word suitable for an ML research paper, but it's not helpful to users. Really it is simply the positive prompt weight.

[ssokolow]

I agree that it's all full of opaque research paper naming, but my point is that it's too late to change the forest of guides and other sites that call it "CFG scale" so, if both are problematic, might as well apply some HCI 101 and treat it like learning an icon.

(As my introductory Human-Computer Interaction textbook said, affordances like "this icon is a trash can" only help while learning a UI. Once the user has learned the UI, consistency with other interfaces, such as "the save icon should be a floppy disk, despite nobody using them anymore, because it's become 'the save glyph'" is paramount.)

Tooltip or (i) for teaching what "CFG scale" means; "CFG scale" for consistency with all the guides that have been written, and automatic1111, and things like the generation parameters sheet Civitai displays for uploaded images.

Want to open an A1111 issue here?

I'll do so after I've finished switching over to my new Ryzen system. Aside from its apparent lack of JSON import/export for generation parameters making me disinterested, I also almost never run automatic1111 on my current machine because Easy Diffusion runs just fine on an Athlon II X2 270 from 2011 as long as you stick an RTX 3060 in it, but automatic1111 is a bit of a pig and I don't like reporting bugs without having first gotten a solid feel for how a UI is supposed to work.

(Thanks for not depending on an AVX-requiring build of TensorFlow like Khoya does, by the way.)

[fdwr]

Aside from its apparent lack of JSON import/export for generation parameters making me disinterested

:(

I also almost never run automatic1111 on my current machine

And Easy Diffusion is much nicer for exploring variations and seeing your current queue and past generations.

[ssokolow]

And Easy Diffusion is much nicer for exploring variations and seeing your current queue and past generations.

Exactly. In my opinion, Easy Diffusion has the superior UI design without question. The only reasons I sometimes use automatic1111 are:

1. Support for LoCon
2. The plugin that lets you interactively create/edit OpenPose ControlNets

EDIT: Oh, and support for the 4x UltraSharp upscaler.

EDIT 2025-09-01: These days, very much "Oh, and regional prompting".

[cmdr2]

Yeah, merging https://github.com/easydiffusion/easydiffusion/issues/1937 into this.

Basically, ED needs to communicate that:

• Guidance scale is another name for "CFG Scale"
• Prompt strength is another name for "Denoising strength"