Diffusion and rectified flow (RF) models generate high-fidelity images and videos, but their iterative velocity-field evaluations are computationally expensive. Existing caching methods accelerate sampling by skipping timesteps, yet their coarse approximations introduce accumulated errors over long skip intervals and degrade quality under aggressive acceleration. We propose TACache (Trajectory-Aware Cache), a training-free acceleration framework following a skip-then-compensate paradigm. TACache performs an orthogonal decomposition of discrete velocity acceleration along the RF trajectory into a parallel component and an orthogonal residual, isolating the magnitude and directional sources of per-step approximation error. The framework operates in two stages: offline, cumulative variation thresholds on the magnitude and direction indicators yield the skip schedule and bound how far each skip interval may extend; online, at each skipped step the offline statistics are combined with the sample's historical orthogonal direction to reconstruct the skipped velocity without additional model evaluations. Experiments on BAGEL, FLUX.1-dev, and Wan2.1-1.3B show that TACache achieves up to 4.14 speedup on text-to-image generation and 2.11 speedup on text-to-video generation, with consistent improvements over prior cache-based methods on all reference-based fidelity metrics. Code will be released soon.
Though rectified flow models have achieved remarkable performance in image, video, and 3D generation, their practical deployments are challenged by slow inference speeds. Prior acceleration methods reuse cached features from previous steps, which neglects the growing mismatch between static caches and the evolving input, leading to reduced output fidelity. This work proposes Velocity Decomposition and Estimation (VDE), a training-free acceleration method that shifts the paradigm from caching-and-reusing to decomposing-and-estimating. Specifically, VDE decomposes the model's velocity into components parallel and orthogonal to the input, exploiting their temporal predictability and directional stability for precise, input-adaptive estimation. To prevent error accumulation, it periodically anchors the model's state via full forward passes. Extensive experiments on image and video generation tasks demonstrate that VDE achieves substantial acceleration with minimal loss in visual quality. Notably, VDE accelerates Flux by 3.22 times and achieves an LPIPS of 0.069 on Qwen-Image, outperforming the best baseline with a 52.2% reduction.
We propose OTCache, a training-free framework for accelerating diffusion sampling via caching schedule prediction. Existing graph-based caching methods reduce redundant computation by optimizing shortest-path objectives, but rely on an additive independence assumption, which often breaks down in the low NFE regime. To address this issue, OTCache models caching schedules across inference budgets as a smooth evolution in policy space, inspired by Optimal Transport (OT). The framework consists of three stages: (1) obtaining a high-fidelity \textbf{reference schedule} using a graph-based caching method under a conservative budget; (2) performing a lightweight anchor search under an extreme low-budget setting via Optuna optimization with an end-to-end perceptual objective; and (3) predicting schedules for target budgets via quantile interpolation between the reference and anchor policies using continuous warping representations. Experiments on FLUX.1 [dev], Qwen-Image, and HunyuanVideo show that OTCache achieves 4.5x, 4.7x, and 3.66x acceleration, respectively, while consistently improving generation fidelity over state-of-the-art caching baselines. This work provides a new perspective on accelerating diffusion models through Optimal-Transport-inspired schedule modeling. Code:https://github.com/UnicomAI/OTCache
Diffusion Transformers require repeated denoiser evaluations during iterative sampling, making inference computationally expensive. Cache-based acceleration reduces this cost by reusing intermediate representations across denoising steps, but can introduce representation deviations and degrade generation quality. In this paper, we analyze these deviations and show that effective calibration should consider both the direct mismatch caused by reuse and the subsequent trajectory shift induced by earlier corrections. To address this challenge, we propose Trajectory-Consistent Calibration (TCC), a training-free method that calibrates cached representations toward their full-computation counterparts. Specifically, rather than estimating all calibration priors from a single uncorrected cache trajectory, TCC uses an offline iterative procedure so that each prior accounts for the trajectory shift induced by preceding calibrations. Experiments on PixArt-alpha and DiT-XL/2 show that TCC consistently improves FID across representative cache-based acceleration methods while preserving their underlying reuse policies. Notably, in a representative PixArt-alpha cache-acceleration setting based on FORA, TCC reduces FID from 29.83 to 27.35, slightly surpassing the full-computation baseline.