Flow matching models for video generation achieve impressive performance but suffer from high computational overhead due to iterative denoising. In fact, the original model is not necessary for all denoising steps, allowing some steps to use lightweight alternatives for faster sampling. However, directly using caching or lightweight models can deviate from the original denoising trajectory, resulting in suboptimal performance. Through empirical analysis, we find that lightweight models can robustly capture the magnitude components of the original model's output, while caching provides reliable directional guidance. Building on this insight, we propose the Magnitude-Direction Decoupling (MDD) method, which adaptively employs a direction-calibrated lightweight model as a substitute for the original model to accelerate inference and effectively correct deviations in the denoising trajectory. Moreover, MDD further reduces inference costs by reusing magnitude information under classifier-free guidance (CFG). As a result, MDD offers a more reliable and lightweight solution to accelerate sampling. Experiments show that MDD outperforms existing acceleration methods, delivering promising speedups (e.g., up to 2.95x on Wan2.1) while preserving high visual fidelity and content richness.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Comparison of visual fidelity and sampling speed with competing methods. Latency is measured on a single A100 GPU. LPIPS denotes learned perceptual image patch similarity. Video synthesis configuration: 81 frames, 5s, 480P on Wan2.1-14B. Our method consistently generates outputs that better preserve the visual fidelity and richness of the original video content while achieving enhanced acceleration performance. The limitations of competing methods are highlighted in red boxes and are best examined under zoomed-in view.
Figure 3: Visualization of decoupled model output relationships. (a,d) directional similarities of vθ(xt,t) with vφ(xt,t) and v^θ(xt,t) ; (b,e) magnitude ratios of vθ(xt,t) to vφ(xt,t) and to v^θ(xt,t) ; (c,f) magnitudes of vφ(xt,t∣c) (Cond) and vφ(xt,t∣c=∅) (Uncond). Directional similarities are evaluated using cosine similarity, and magnitudes are measured using ℓ2 norms.
Figure 4: Comparison of our method with the adaptive caching method, TeaCache [ 22 ] , and the large-small model collaborative inference strategy, SRDiffusion [ 6 ] . Our method improves the approximation of the original large output by combining direction estimation from residual reuse with magnitude estimation from the small model, offering a more reliable lightweight alternative for accelerating inference.
Method
Efficiency
Visual Quality
Speedup ↑
Latency ↓
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
VBench ↑
Wan2.1 (832 × 480, 81 frames, T=50 )
Wan2.1-14B
1 ×
948 s
-
-
-
83.09%
Wan2.1-1.3B
-
192 s
0.597
11.81
0.336
81.00%
TeaCache [ 22 ]
2.62 ×
362 s
0.208
20.95
0.680
82.41%
SRDiffusion [ 6 ]
2.75 ×
344 s
0.240
19.10
0.636
83.01%
Table 1: Quantitative evaluation of inference efficiency and visual quality in video generation models. Visual retention metrics, including LPIPS, SSIM, and PSNR, are calculated against the original large models (Wan2.1-14B and EasyAnimateV5.1-12B).
Threshold τ
Efficiency
Visual Quality
Speedup ↑
Latency ↓
LPIPS ↓
PSNR ↑
SSIM ↑
VBench ↑
Wan2.1-14B
1 ×
948 s
-
-
-
83.09%
τ=0.001
2.21 ×
428 s
0.131
23.76
0.786
82.74%
τ=0.002
2.76 ×
344 s
0.148
23.33
0.771
82.85%
τ=0.005
2.95 ×
321 s
0.178
22.72
0.748
82.62%
τ=0.010
3.12 ×
303 s
0.207
22.21
0.728
82.20%
Table 2: Ablation study of threshold τ in Eq. ( 6 ) on Wan2.1-14B. A larger threshold enables a greater proportion of steps to be approximated by the lightweight small-model, yielding higher acceleration at the expense of visual quality.
Methods
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
VBench ↑
MDD w/o rescaling
0.197
21.40
0.689
81.16%
MDD
0.178
22.72
0.748
82.62%
Table 3: Ablation study of rescaling with the lightweight model on Wan2.1-14B.
CFG Reuse
Efficiency
Visual Quality
Speedup ↑
Latency ↓
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
VBench ↑
×
-
385 s
0.177
22.73
0.750
82.64%
✓
1.20 ×
321 s
0.178
22.72
0.748
82.62%
Table 4: Ablation study of CFG Reuse on Wan2.1. Visual retention metrics (LPIPS, SSIM, and PSNR) are computed relative to the Wan2.1-14B model, with τ set to 0.005.
Interval
Efficiency
Visual Quality
Speedup ↑
Latency ↓
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
Wan2.1-14B
1 ×
476 s
-
-
-
TeaCache [ 22 ]
2.37 ×
201 s
0.367
17.54
0.607
SRDiffusion [ 6 ]
2.47 ×
193 s
0.381
16.75
0.585
Ours ( τ = 0.002)
2.50 ×
190 s
0.276
18.93
0.661
Ours ( τ = 0.005)
2.77 ×
172 s
0.292
18.48
0.655
Table 5: Results for Wan2.1-14B 720p, with latency measured under an 8 × NVIDIA A100 GPU setup.
Methods
ODE solver
Efficiency
Visual Quality
Speedup ↑
Latency ↓
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
VBench ↑
Wan2.1-14B (T=50)
UniPC
1 ×
948 s
-
-
-
83.09%
Ours (T=50)
UniPC
2.95 ×
321 s
0.178
22.72
0.748
82.62%
Wan2.1-14B (T=40)
DPM++
1 ×
766 s
-
-
-
82.86%
Ours (T=40)
DPM++
2.68 ×
286 s
0.169
23.00
0.765
82.45%
Table 6: Empirical analysis of lightweight substitution intervals.
Interval
Efficiency
Visual Quality
Speedup ↑
Latency ↓
LPIPS ↓
SSIM ↑
PSNR ↑
VBench ↑
0%–95%
3.85 ×
246 s
0.567
13.43
0.431
79.02%
20%–95% (Ours)
2.95 ×
321 s
0.178
22.72
0.748
82.62%
Table 7: Compatibility analysis results between MDD and efficient ODE solvers.
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.
Generation in video diffusion or flow models is computationally expensive due to the slow and iterative sampling process. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) acceleration methods heavily rely on variational score distillation (VSD) and adversarial losses to distill diffusion models into few-step generators. Albeit achieving high-quality video generation, these training losses are notoriously hard to optimize and suffer from mode collapse, leading to loss of video diversity and lack of motion. In this paper, we introduce Parallel Decoding Distillation (PDD), a simplified and scalable trajectory-based distillation method for fast inference of diffusion and flow matching models. Our architecture and training procedure are compatible with any pre-trained model and support sampling with a varying number of function evaluations (NFE). PDD accelerates generation by predicting multiple denoising steps per network evaluation. Conceptually, it learns a representation of the mean velocity without regressing its derivative using JVPs or finite-difference approximations. Our method achieves SOTA performance with 4-8 NFE on LTX-2.3 Text-to-Video/Audio, Wan 14B Text-to-Video, and Qwen-Image Text-to-Image. Moreover, PDD presents a significant improvement in generated video diversity.
Video generation models based on Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved remarkable performance in video synthesis, yet they suffer from high inference latency and computational costs due to the quadratic complexity of 3D attention. Existing acceleration methods primarily reduce computational complexity within each individual denoising steps through techniques such as sparse attention and KV-caching. However, they rigidly adhere to the inherent constraint of the standard diffusion pipeline: every frame in the target video sequence must be subjected to a complete, dense denoising process across all diffusion timesteps. We observe that due to the corresponding contents and motions among adjacent frames, when keyframes with critical semantic transitions are anchored, the intermediate states of others often follow more predictable trajectories, which indicates that such uniform, dense denoising process is inherently redundant for natural video data. To this end, we introduce RhymeFlow, a training-free framework that decouples the denoising trajectories of different frames. Specifically, we first identify a sparse set of pivotal key frames that dominate the latent semantic evolution. Then, only these keyframes undergo dense, step-by-step denoising to ensure structural integrity, while non-keyframes progressively skip denoising steps to minimize computational cost. Since skipped intermediate states of non-keyframes break the temporal coherence in keyframe denoising steps, leading to visual degradation, we further introduce a latent trajectory projection module, which enables keyframes to interact with a complete and temporally consistent sequence representation. Extensive experiments on current DiT-based video generation models demonstrate our method outperforms existing baselines with higher inference speed and better visual quality.