In this paper, we uncover the hidden potential of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) to significantly enhance generative tasks. Through an in-depth analysis of the denoising process, we demonstrate that introducing a single learned scaling parameter can significantly improve the performance of DiT blocks. Building on this insight, we propose Calibri, a parameter-efficient approach that optimally calibrates DiT components to elevate generative quality. Calibri frames DiT calibration as a black-box reward optimization problem, which is efficiently solved using an evolutionary algorithm and modifies just ~100 parameters. Experimental results reveal that despite its lightweight design, Calibri consistently improves performance across various text-to-image models. Notably, Calibri also reduces the inference steps required for image generation, all while maintaining high-quality outputs.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Illustration of DiT architectural components.
Figure 3: Motivational Experiment: Our findings reveal that the contribution of DiT blocks is not fully optimized. We demonstrate that their performance can be enhanced through a straightforward output scaling using a scalar multiplier.
Figure 4: Illustration of calibration parameter search procedure.
Scaling
N params
iters
HPSv3
IR
Q-Align
–
–
–
11.41
1.15
4.85
Block
57
200
13.29
1.17
4.91
Layer
76
410
13.41
1.24
4.90
Gate
114
960
13.48
1.18
4.88
Table 1: Comparison of various granularity levels for internal-layer calibration applied to the Flux model. All experiments are conducted using the Flux model, with evaluation performed on the HPSv3 test set.
Figure 5: Quantitative comparison of various granularity levels for internal-layer calibration applied to the Flux model.
Figure 6: Comparison between Calibri Ensemble and original model across several inference steps.
Model
Calibri
HPSv3
IR
Q-Align
NFE
FLUX
✗
11.41
1.15
4.85
30
✓
13.48
1.18
4.88
15
SD-3.5M
✗
11.15
1.10
4.74
80
✓
14.10
1.17
4.91
30
Qwen Image
✗
11.26
1.16
4.55
100
✓
12.95
1.18
4.73
30
Table 2: Quantitative evaluation of generation quality improvements across various baseline models. Notably, Calibri achieves superior metric scores while requiring fewer inference steps.
Figure 7: Qualitative evaluation of generation quality improvements across various baseline models. Models have same NFE as in Table 2 .
Methods
Overall Preference
Text Alignment
Calibri
Equal
Original
Calibri
Equal
Original
Flux
51.87
7.33
40.80
38.71
37.68
23.61
Qwen-Image
54.62
7.91
37.47
40.29
37.65
22.06
Table 3: Human evaluation: Calibri vs. Baselines win rates %.
Flow-GRPO
Calibri
HPSv3
PickScore
Q-Align
NFE
✗
✗
11.15
22.40
4.74
80
PickScore
12.47
23.13
4.91
30
PickScore
✗
12.67
23.78
4.92
80
PickScore
12.96
23.93
4.85
30
GenEval
✗
10.16
22.22
4.69
80
HPSv3
14.18
22.22
4.88
30
Table 4: Comparison of Calibri and Flow-GRPO [ 24 ] on SD-3.5M. Calibri achieves comparable performance with 105 fewer parameters and can be combined with alignment methods to boost either the same or different target metrics.
Figure 8: Qualitative comparison of Calibri and Flow-GRPO [ 24 ] on SD-3.5M. Calibri achieves comparable performance with 105 fewer parameters and can be combined with alignment methods to boost either the same or different target metrics.
Model
Flux
SD-3.5M
Qwen-Image
Scaling type
Block
Layer
Gate
Gate
Gate
CFG type
CFG Distill
Standard CFG
N params
57
76
114
216
482
N iters
200
410
960
2280
630
GPU hours
32
64
150
356
286
Table 5: Calibration cost.
Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 9: Limitations of modern reward models.
Flow-GRPO
Calibri
HPSv3
PickScore
Q-Align
Dino Diversity
NFE
✗
✗
11.15
22.40
4.74
0.20±0.06
80
✗
9.5
22.04
4.51
0.25±0.08
30
PickScore
12.47
23.13
4.91
0.20±0.06
30
PickScore
✗
12.67
23.78
4.92
0.15±0.06
80
✗
12.514
23.76
4.91
0.15±0.05
30
PickScore
12.96
23.93
4.85
0.15±0.05
30
Appendix
Table 6: Comparison of Generation Diversity for SD-3.5M [ 8 ] Optimized by Calibri and Flow-GRPO [ 24 ] .
Figure 10: Illustration of Calibri with different rewards as objective.
Calibri
HPSv3
IR
Q-Align
PickScore
NFE
✗
11.41
1.15
4.85
22.88
30
HPSv3
13.41
1.24
4.90
23.07
15
ImageReward
11.06
1.17
4.70
22.47
15
Q-Align
11.65
1.0
4.89
22.36
15
PickScore
13.34
1.2
4.89
23.24
15
Appendix
Table 7: Quantitative comparison of Calibri layer scale on Flux [ 22 ] across different reward models.
Figure 11: Comparison of CMA-ES and Flow-GRPO performance in optimizing Calibri coefficients.
Diffusion Transformers use attention-based networks to generate and transform images, video, audio, and other structured data through iterative denoising.
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in image and video generation, but their success comes at the cost of heavy computation. This inefficiency is largely due to the fixed tokenization process, which uses constant-sized patches throughout the entire denoising phase, regardless of the content's complexity. We propose dynamic tokenization, an efficient test-time strategy that varies patch sizes based on content complexity and the denoising timestep. Our key insight is that early timesteps only require coarser patches to model global structure, while later iterations demand finer (smaller-sized) patches to refine local details. During inference, our method dynamically reallocates patch sizes across denoising steps for image and video generation and substantially reduces cost while preserving perceptual generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: it achieves up to 3.52× and 3.2× speedup on FLUX-1.Dev and Wan 2.1, respectively, without compromising the generation quality and prompt adherence.
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have significantly enhanced text-to-image (T2I) generation quality, enabling high-quality personalized content creation. However, fine-tuning these models requires substantial computational complexity and memory, limiting practical deployment under resource constraints. To tackle these challenges, we propose a memory-efficient fine-tuning framework called DiT-BlockSkip, integrating timestep-aware dynamic patch sampling and block skipping by precomputing residual features. Our dynamic patch sampling strategy adjusts patch sizes based on the diffusion timestep, then resizes the cropped patches to a fixed lower resolution. This approach reduces forward & backward memory usage while allowing the model to capture global structures at higher timesteps and fine-grained details at lower timesteps. The block skipping mechanism selectively fine-tunes essential transformer blocks and precomputes residual features for the skipped blocks, significantly reducing training memory. To identify vital blocks for personalization, we introduce a block selection strategy based on cross-attention masking. Evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive personalization performance qualitatively and quantitatively, while reducing memory usage substantially, moving toward on-device feasibility (e.g., smartphones, IoT devices) for large-scale diffusion transformers.
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) are a dominant backbone for high-fidelity text-to-image generation due to strong scalability and alignment at high resolutions. However, quadratic self-attention over dense spatial tokens leads to high inference latency and limits deployment. We observe that denoising is spatially non-uniform with respect to aesthetic descriptors in the prompt. Regions associated with aesthetic tokens receive concentrated cross-attention and show larger temporal variation, while low-affinity regions evolve smoothly with redundant computation. Based on this insight, we propose AccelAes, a training-free framework that accelerates DiTs through aesthetics-aware spatio-temporal reduction while improving perceptual aesthetics. AccelAes builds AesMask, a one-shot aesthetic focus mask derived from prompt semantics and cross-attention signals. When localized computation is feasible, SkipSparse reallocates computation and guidance to masked regions. We further reduce temporal redundancy using a lightweight step-level prediction cache that periodically replaces full Transformer evaluations. Experiments on representative DiT families show consistent acceleration and improved aesthetics-oriented quality. On Lumina-Next, AccelAes achieves a 2.11× speedup and improves ImageReward by +11.9% over the dense baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/xuanhuayin/AccelAes.
Xuanhua Yin, Chuanzhi Xu, Haoxian Zhou +2
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia