Diffusion Model Inference Acceleration

Overview

Diffusion models repeatedly denoise a sample, so inference acceleration studies how to reduce the cost of those steps for image, video, language, and action generation. Methods reduce the number of evaluations with faster solvers, timestep schedules, and few-step distillation, or reduce work within each step using caching, sparse attention, token pruning, compression, and lower-precision computation. Systems work also targets memory movement, GPU parallelism, and serving, while adaptive methods allocate computation according to uncertainty, content, or task difficulty. The central challenge is preserving fidelity, diversity, and task accuracy as skipped or approximated computations can accumulate errors; gains therefore depend on the model, workload, hardware, and end-to-end evaluation.

Latest papers

509 papers73 papers in the last four weeks, up 66% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

Mar 13, 2026

LADR: Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue for Efficient Text-to-Image Generation with Diffusion Large Language Models

Discrete Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a compelling paradigm for unified multimodal generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high inference latency arising from iterative decoding. Existing acceleration strategies often require expensive re-training or fail to leverage the 2D spatial redundancy inherent in visual data. To address this, we propose Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue (LADR), a training-free method that expedites inference by exploiting the spatial Markov property of images. LADR prioritizes the recovery of tokens at the ''generation frontier'', regions spatially adjacent to observed pixels, thereby maximizing information gain. Specifically, our method integrates morphological neighbor identification to locate candidate tokens, employs a risk-bounded filtering mechanism to prevent error propagation, and utilizes manifold-consistent inverse scheduling to align the diffusion trajectory with the accelerated mask density. Extensive experiments on four text-to-image generation benchmarks demonstrate that our LADR achieves an approximate 4 x speedup over standard baselines. Remarkably, it maintains or even enhances generative fidelity, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks, offering a state-of-the-art trade-off between efficiency and quality.
Mar 13, 2026

DAPD: Dependency-Aware Parallel Decoding via Attention for Diffusion LLMs

Parallel decoding for Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) is difficult because each denoising step provides only token-wise marginal distributions, while unmasking multiple tokens simultaneously requires accounting for inter-token dependencies. We propose Dependency-Aware Parallel Decoding (DAPD), a simple, training-free decoding method that uses self-attention to induce a conditional dependency graph over masked tokens. At each iteration, edges in this graph capture strong token interactions, while non-edges indicate weak dependence. Parallel decoding is then reduced to selecting an independent set on the graph and unmasking the selected tokens in parallel. This avoids co-updating strongly coupled tokens without auxiliary models or retraining. Experiments on LLaDA and Dream show that DAPD improves the accuracy-steps trade-off over existing methods and enables more globally distributed parallel updates that better exploit the any-order generation capability of dLLMs. The project is available at https://ai-isl.github.io/dapd
Mar 13, 2026

Draft-and-Target Sampling for Video Generation Policy

Video generation models have been used as a robot policy to predict the future states of executing a task conditioned on task description and observation. Previous works ignore their high computational cost and long inference time. To address this challenge, we propose Draft-and-Target Sampling, a novel diffusion inference paradigm for video generation policy that is training-free and can improve inference efficiency. We introduce a self-play denoising approach by utilizing two complementary denoising trajectories in a single model, draft sampling takes large steps to generate a global trajectory in a fast manner and target sampling takes small steps to verify it. To further speedup generation, we introduce token chunking and progressive acceptance strategy to reduce redundant computation. Experiments on three benchmarks show that our method can achieve up to 2.1x speedup and improve the efficiency of current state-of-the-art methods with minimal compromise to the success rate. Our code is available.
Mar 13, 2026

AccelAes: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers for Training-Free Aesthetic-Enhanced Image Generation

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×\times speedup and improves ImageReward by +11.9% over the dense baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/xuanhuayin/AccelAes.
Mar 12, 2026

One Model, Many Budgets: Elastic Latent Interfaces for Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) achieve high generative quality but lock FLOPs to image resolution, limiting principled latency-quality trade-offs, and allocate computation uniformly across input spatial tokens, wasting resource allocation to unimportant regions. We introduce Elastic Latent Interface Transformer (ELIT), a drop-in, DiT-compatible mechanism that decouples input image size from compute. Our approach inserts a latent interface, a learnable variable-length token sequence on which standard transformer blocks can operate. Lightweight Read and Write cross-attention layers move information between spatial tokens and latents and prioritize important input regions. By training with random dropping of tail latents, ELIT learns to produce importance-ordered representations with earlier latents capturing global structure while later ones contain information to refine details. At inference, the number of latents can be dynamically adjusted to match compute constraints. ELIT is deliberately minimal, adding two cross-attention layers while leaving the rectified flow objective and the DiT stack unchanged. Across datasets and architectures (DiT, U-ViT, HDiT, MM-DiT), ELIT delivers consistent gains. On ImageNet-1K 512px, ELIT delivers an average gain of 35.3%35.3\% and 39.6%39.6\% in FID and FDD scores. Project page: https://snap-research.github.io/elit/
Mar 12, 2026

SoulX-LiveAct: Towards Hour-Scale Real-Time Human Animation with Neighbor Forcing and ConvKV Memory

Autoregressive (AR) diffusion models offer a promising framework for sequential generation tasks such as video synthesis by combining diffusion modeling with causal inference. Although they support streaming generation, existing AR diffusion methods struggle to scale efficiently. In this paper, we identify two key challenges in hour-scale real-time human animation. First, most forcing strategies propagate sample-level representations with mismatched diffusion states, causing inconsistent learning signals and unstable convergence. Second, historical representations grow unbounded and lack structure, preventing effective reuse of cached states and severely limiting inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Neighbor Forcing, a diffusion-step-consistent AR formulation that propagates temporally adjacent frames as latent neighbors under the same noise condition. This design provides a distribution-aligned and stable learning signal while preserving drifting throughout the AR chain. Building upon this, we introduce a structured ConvKV memory mechanism that compresses the keys and values in causal attention into a fixed-length representation, enabling constant-memory inference and truly infinite video generation without relying on short-term motion-frame memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves training convergence, hour-scale generation quality, and inference efficiency compared to existing AR diffusion methods. Numerically, LiveAct enables hour-scale real-time human animation and supports 20 FPS real-time streaming inference on as few as two NVIDIA H100 or H200 GPUs. Quantitative results demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance in lip-sync accuracy, human animation quality, and emotional expressiveness, with the lowest inference cost.
Mar 12, 2026

DyWeight: Dynamic Gradient Weighting for Few-Step Diffusion Sampling

Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art generative performance across multiple modalities, yet their sampling process remains prohibitively slow due to the need for hundreds of function evaluations. Recent progress in multi-step ODE solvers has greatly improved efficiency by reusing historical gradients, but existing methods rely on handcrafted coefficients that fail to adapt to the non-stationary dynamics of diffusion sampling. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Gradient Weighting (DyWeight), a lightweight, learning-based multi-step solver that introduces a streamlined implicit coupling paradigm. By relaxing classical numerical constraints, DyWeight learns unconstrained time-varying parameters that adaptively aggregate historical gradients while intrinsically scaling the effective step size. This implicit time calibration accurately aligns the solver's numerical trajectory with the model's internal denoising dynamics under large integration steps, avoiding complex decoupled parameterizations and optimizations. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, FFHQ, AFHQv2, ImageNet64, LSUN-Bedroom, Stable Diffusion and FLUX.1-dev demonstrate that DyWeight achieves superior visual fidelity and stability with significantly fewer function evaluations, establishing a new state-of-the-art among efficient diffusion solvers. Code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/DyWeight
Mar 11, 2026

Just-in-Time: Training-Free Spatial Acceleration for Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers have established a new state-of-the-art in image synthesis, but the high computational cost of iterative sampling severely hampers their practical deployment. While existing acceleration methods often focus on the temporal domain, they overlook the substantial spatial redundancy inherent in the generative process, where global structures emerge long before fine-grained details are formed. The uniform computational treatment of all spatial regions represents a critical inefficiency. In this paper, we introduce Just-in-Time (JiT), a novel training-free framework that addresses this challenge by acceleration in the spatial domain. JiT formulates a spatially approximated generative ordinary differential equation (ODE) that drives the full latent state evolution based on computations from a dynamically selected, sparse subset of anchor tokens. To ensure seamless transitions as new tokens are incorporated to expand the dimensions of the latent state, we propose a deterministic micro-flow, a simple and effective finite-time ODE that maintains both structural coherence and statistical correctness. Extensive experiments on the state-of-the-art FLUX.1-dev model demonstrate that JiT achieves up to a 7x speedup with nearly lossless performance, significantly outperforming existing acceleration methods and establishing a new and superior trade-off between inference speed and generation fidelity.
Mar 11, 2026

Need for Speed: Zero-Shot Depth Completion with Single-Step Diffusion

We introduce Marigold-SSD, a single-step, late-fusion depth completion framework that leverages strong diffusion priors while eliminating the costly test-time optimization typically associated with diffusion-based methods. By shifting computational burden from inference to finetuning, our approach enables efficient and robust 3D perception under real-world latency constraints. Marigold-SSD achieves significantly faster inference with a training cost of only 4.5 GPU days. We evaluate our method across four indoor and two outdoor benchmarks, demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization and zero-shot performance compared to existing depth completion approaches. Our approach significantly narrows the efficiency gap between diffusion-based and discriminative models. Finally, we challenge common evaluation protocols by analyzing performance under varying input sparsity levels. Page: https://dtu-pas.github.io/marigold-ssd/
Mar 10, 2026

ES-dLLM: Efficient Inference for Diffusion Large Language Models by Early-Skipping

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) due to their ability to capture bidirectional context and the potential for parallel generation. Despite the advantages, dLLM inference remains computationally expensive as the full input context is processed at every iteration. In this work, we analyze the generation dynamics of dLLMs and find that intermediate representations, including key, value, and hidden states, change only subtly across successive iterations. Leveraging this insight, we propose ES-dLLM, a training-free inference acceleration framework for dLLM that reduces computation by skipping tokens in early layers based on the estimated importance. Token importance is computed with intermediate tensor variation and confidence scores of previous iterations. Experiments on LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B demonstrate that ES-dLLM achieves throughput of up to 226.57 and 308.51 tokens per second (TPS), respectively, on an NVIDIA H200 GPU, delivering 5.6×\times to 16.8×\times speedup over the vanilla implementation and up to 1.85×\times over the state-of-the-art caching method, while preserving generation quality.
Mar 9, 2026

SVG-EAR: Parameter-Free Linear Compensation for Sparse Video Generation via Error-aware Routing

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become a leading backbone for video generation, yet their quadratic attention cost remains a major bottleneck. Sparse attention reduces this cost by computing only a subset of attention blocks. However, prior methods often either drop the remaining blocks, which incurs information loss, or rely on learned predictors to approximate them, introducing training overhead and potential output distribution shifting. In this paper, we show that the missing contributions can be recovered without training: after semantic clustering, keys and values within each block exhibit strong similarity and can be well summarized by a small set of cluster centroids. Based on this observation, we introduce SVG-EAR, a parameter-free linear compensation branch that uses the centroid to approximate skipped blocks and recover their contributions. While centroid compensation is accurate for most blocks, it can fail on a small subset. Standard sparsification typically selects blocks by attention scores, which indicate where the model places its attention mass, but not where the approximation error would be largest. SVG-EAR therefore performs error-aware routing: a lightweight probe estimates the compensation error for each block, and we compute exactly the blocks with the highest error-to-cost ratio while compensating for skipped blocks. We provide theoretical guarantees that relate attention reconstruction error to clustering quality, and empirically show that SVG-EAR improves the quality-efficiency trade-off and increases throughput at the same generation fidelity on video diffusion tasks. Overall, SVG-EAR establishes a clear Pareto frontier over prior approaches, achieving up to 1.77×\times and 1.93×\times speedups while maintaining PSNRs of up to 29.759 and 31.043 on Wan2.2 and HunyuanVideo, respectively.
Mar 9, 2026

HiAR: Efficient Autoregressive Long Video Generation via Hierarchical Denoising

Autoregressive (AR) diffusion offers a promising framework for generating videos of theoretically infinite length. However, a major challenge is maintaining temporal continuity while preventing the progressive quality degradation caused by error accumulation. To ensure continuity, existing methods typically condition on highly denoised contexts; yet, this practice propagates prediction errors with high certainty, thereby exacerbating degradation. In this paper, we argue that a highly clean context is unnecessary. Drawing inspiration from bidirectional diffusion models, which denoise frames at a shared noise level while maintaining coherence, we propose that conditioning on context at the same noise level as the current block provides sufficient signal for temporal consistency while effectively mitigating error propagation. Building on this insight, we propose HiAR, a hierarchical denoising framework that reverses the conventional generation order: instead of completing each block sequentially, it performs causal generation across all blocks at every denoising step, so that each block is always conditioned on context at the same noise level. This hierarchy naturally admits pipelined parallel inference, yielding a 1.8 wall-clock speedup in our 4-step setting. We further observe that self-rollout distillation under this paradigm amplifies a low-motion shortcut inherent to the mode-seeking reverse-KL objective. To counteract this, we introduce a forward-KL regulariser in bidirectional-attention mode, which preserves motion diversity for causal inference without interfering with the distillation loss. On VBench (20s generation), HiAR achieves the best overall score and the lowest temporal drift among all compared methods.
Mar 9, 2026

WaDi: Weight Direction-aware Distillation for One-step Image Synthesis

Despite the impressive performance of diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) in image generation, their slow inference limits practical deployment. Recent works accelerate inference by distilling multi-step diffusion into one-step generators. To better understand the distillation mechanism, we analyze U-Net/DiT weight changes between one-step students and their multi-step teacher counterparts. Our analysis reveals that changes in weight direction significantly exceed those in weight norm, highlighting it as the key factor during distillation. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Low-rank Rotation of weight Direction (LoRaD), a parameter-efficient adapter tailored to one-step diffusion distillation. LoRaD is designed to model these structured directional changes using learnable low-rank rotation matrices. We further integrate LoRaD into Variational Score Distillation (VSD), resulting in Weight Direction-aware Distillation (WaDi)-a novel one-step distillation framework. WaDi achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on COCO 2014 and COCO 2017 while using only approximately 10% of the trainable parameters of the U-Net/DiT. Furthermore, the distilled one-step model demonstrates strong versatility and scalability, generalizing well to various downstream tasks such as controllable generation, relation inversion, and high-resolution synthesis.
Mar 9, 2026

DyLLM: Efficient Diffusion LLM Inference via Saliency-based Token Selection and Partial Attention

Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token decoding, providing a promising alternative to the sequential nature of autoregressive generation. However, their iterative denoising process remains computationally expensive because it repeatedly processes the entire sequence at every step. We observe that across these diffusion steps, most token representations remain stable; only a small subset, which we term salient tokens, contributes meaningfully to the next update. Leveraging this temporal sparsity, we present DyLLM, a training-free inference framework that accelerates decoding by selectively computing only these salient tokens. DyLLM identifies saliency by measuring the cosine similarity of attention contexts between adjacent denoising steps. It recomputes feed-forward and attention operations only for salient tokens while reusing cached activations for the remainder. Across diverse reasoning and code-generation benchmarks, DyLLM achieves up to 9.6x higher throughput while largely preserving the baseline accuracy of representative open-source diffusion LLMs, LLaDA, and Dream.
Mar 9, 2026

SoundWeaver: Compositional Warm-Starting for Text-to-Audio Diffusion Serving

Text-to-audio (T2A) diffusion models generate high-quality audio but require tens of neural function evaluations (NFEs), resulting in substantial inference latency. Existing acceleration methods primarily optimize each generation trajectory independently, even when reusable acoustic structure exists in prior examples. We introduce SoundWeaver, the first training-free framework for compositional cross example acoustic reuse. Rather than generating from pure noise, SoundWeaver constructs a prompt-conditioned acoustic prior from segments distributed across cached audios and warm-starts diffusion from an intermediate noise level. We introduce an Acoustic Composition Graph (ACG), which uses neural codec representations and segment-level identification to identify candidate cross-cache transitions and structured path search to jointly optimize prompt relevance and acoustic continuity. We further establish a warm-start error bound showing how prior quality and diffusion SNR jointly govern the admissible skip depth, motivating an adaptive contextual-bandit Skip Gater that selects the warm-start level for each request. Across T2A diffusion backbones, SoundWeaver achieves 1.48-3.74x generation speedup with only a 1K-clip cache while improving generation quality.
Mar 8, 2026

MWM: Mobile World Models for Action-Conditioned Consistent Prediction

World models enable planning in imagined future predicted space, offering a promising framework for embodied navigation. However, existing navigation world models often lack action-conditioned consistency, so visually plausible predictions can still drift under multi-step rollout and degrade planning. Moreover, efficient deployment requires few-step diffusion inference, but existing distillation methods do not explicitly preserve rollout consistency, creating a training-inference mismatch. To address these challenges, we propose MWM, a mobile world model for planning-based image-goal navigation. Specifically, we introduce a two-stage training framework that combines structure pretraining with Action-Conditioned Consistency (ACC) post-training to improve action-conditioned rollout consistency. We further introduce Inference-Consistent State Distillation (ICSD) for few-step diffusion distillation with improved rollout consistency. Our experiments on benchmark and real-world tasks demonstrate consistent gains in visual fidelity, trajectory accuracy, planning success, and inference efficiency. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/MWM. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/MWM.
Mar 8, 2026

Accelerating Diffusion Models for Generative AI Applications with Silicon Photonics

Diffusion models have revolutionized generative AI, with their inherent capacity to generate highly realistic state-of-the-art synthetic data. However, these models employ an iterative denoising process over computationally intensive layers such as UNets and attention mechanisms. This results in high inference energy on conventional electronic platforms, and thus, there is an emerging need to accelerate these models in a sustainable manner. To address this challenge, we present a novel silicon photonics-based accelerator for diffusion models. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our photonic accelerator achieves at least 3x better energy efficiency and 5.5x throughput improvement compared to state-of-the-art diffusion model accelerators.
Mar 7, 2026

SODA: Sensitivity-Oriented Dynamic Acceleration for Diffusion Transformer

Diffusion Transformers have become a dominant paradigm in visual generation, yet their low inference efficiency remains a key bottleneck hindering further advancement. Among common training-free techniques, caching offers high acceleration efficiency but often compromises fidelity, whereas pruning shows the opposite trade-off. Integrating caching with pruning achieves a balance between acceleration and generation quality. However, existing methods typically employ fixed and heuristic schemes to configure caching and pruning strategies. While they roughly follow the overall sensitivity trend of generation models to acceleration, they fail to capture fine-grained and complex variations, inevitably skipping highly sensitive computations and leading to quality degradation. Furthermore, such manually designed strategies exhibit poor generalization. To address these issues, we propose SODA, a Sensitivity-Oriented Dynamic Acceleration method that adaptively performs caching and pruning based on fine-grained sensitivity. SODA builds an offline sensitivity error modeling framework across timesteps, layers, and modules to capture the sensitivity to different acceleration operations. The cache intervals are optimized via dynamic programming with sensitivity error as the cost function, minimizing the impact of caching on model sensitivity. During pruning and cache reuse, SODA adaptively determines the pruning timing and rate to preserve computations of highly sensitive tokens, significantly enhancing generation fidelity. Extensive experiments on DiT-XL/2, PixArt-αα, and OpenSora demonstrate that SODA achieves state-of-the-art generation fidelity under controllable acceleration ratios. Our code is released publicly at: https://github.com/leaves162/SODA.
Mar 6, 2026

DC-DiT: Adaptive Compute and Elastic Inference for Visual Generation via Dynamic Chunking

Diffusion Transformers rely on static patchify tokenization, assigning the same token budget to smooth backgrounds, detailed object regions, noisy early timesteps, and late-stage refinements. We introduce the Dynamic Chunking Diffusion Transformer (DC-DiT), which replaces fixed patchification with a learned encoder-router-decoder scaffold that adaptively compresses the 2D input into a shorter token sequence through a chunking mechanism learned end-to-end with diffusion training. DC-DiT allocates fewer tokens to predictable regions and noisy timesteps, and more tokens to detailed regions and later refinement stages, yielding meaningful spatial segmentations and timestep-adaptive compression schedules without supervision. Furthermore, the router provides an importance ordering over retained tokens, enabling elastic inference: a single checkpoint can be evaluated at flexible compute budgets with a smooth quality-compute tradeoff. Additionally, DC-DiT can be upcycled from pretrained DiT checkpoints and is also compatible with orthogonal dynamic computation approaches. On class-conditional ImageNet generation, DC-DiT reduces inference FLOPs by up to 36.8% and improves FID by up to 37.8% over DiT baselines, yielding a stronger quality--compute Pareto frontier across model scales, resolutions, and guidance settings. More broadly, these results suggest that adaptive tokenization is a general mechanism for making visual generation both more efficient and more flexible at inference time.
Mar 6, 2026

WorldCache: Accelerating World Models for Free via Heterogeneous Token Caching

Diffusion-based world models have shown strong potential for unified world simulation, but the iterative denoising remains too costly for interactive use and long-horizon rollouts. While feature caching can accelerate inference without training, we find that policies designed for single-modal diffusion transfer poorly to world models due to two world-model-specific obstacles: token heterogeneity from multi-modal coupling and spatial variation, and non-uniform temporal dynamics where a small set of hard tokens drives error growth, making uniform skipping either unstable or overly conservative. We propose WorldCache, a caching framework tailored to diffusion world models. We introduce Curvature-guided Heterogeneous Token Prediction, which uses a physics-grounded curvature score to estimate token predictability and applies a Hermite-guided damped predictor for chaotic tokens with abrupt direction changes. We also design Chaotic-prioritized Adaptive Skipping, which accumulates a curvature-normalized, dimensionless drift signal and recomputes only when bottleneck tokens begin to drift. Experiments on diffusion world models show that WorldCache delivers up to \textbf{3.7×\times} end-to-end speedups while maintaining 98% rollout quality, demonstrating the vast advantages and practicality of WorldCache in resource-constrained scenarios. Our code is released in https://github.com/FofGofx/WorldCache.
Mar 6, 2026

Cross-Resolution Distribution Matching for Diffusion Distillation

Diffusion distillation is central to accelerating image and video generation, yet existing methods are fundamentally limited by the denoising process, where step reduction has largely saturated. Partial timestep low-resolution generation can further accelerate inference, but it suffers noticeable quality degradation due to cross-resolution distribution gaps. We propose Cross-Resolution Distribution Matching Distillation (RMD), a novel distillation framework that bridges cross-resolution distribution gaps for high-fidelity, few-step multi-resolution cascaded inference. Specifically, RMD divides the timestep intervals for each resolution using logarithmic signal-to-noise ratio (logSNR) curves, and introduces logSNR-based mapping to compensate for resolution-induced shifts. Distribution matching is conducted along resolution trajectories to reduce the gap between low-resolution generator distributions and the teacher's high-resolution distribution. In addition, a predicted-noise re-injection mechanism is incorporated during upsampling to stabilize training and improve synthesis quality. Quantitative and qualitative results show that RMD preserves high-fidelity generation while accelerating inference across various backbones. Notably, RMD achieves up to 33.4X speedup on SDXL and 25.6X on Wan2.1-14B, while preserving high visual fidelity.
Mar 6, 2026

TempoSyncDiff: Distilled Temporally-Consistent Diffusion for Low-Latency Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation

Diffusion models have recently advanced photorealistic human synthesis, although practical talking-head generation (THG) remains constrained by high inference latency, temporal instability such as flicker and identity drift, and imperfect audio-visual alignment under challenging speech conditions. This paper introduces TempoSyncDiff, a reference-conditioned latent diffusion framework that explores few-step inference for efficient audio-driven talking-head generation. The approach adopts a teacher-student distillation formulation in which a diffusion teacher trained with a standard noise prediction objective guides a lightweight student denoiser capable of operating with significantly fewer inference steps to improve generation stability. The framework incorporates identity anchoring and temporal regularization designed to mitigate identity drift and frame-to-frame flicker during synthesis, while viseme-based audio conditioning provides coarse lip motion control. Experiments on the LRS3 dataset report denoising-stage component-level metrics relative to VAE reconstructions and preliminary latency characterization, including CPU-only and edge computing measurements and feasibility estimates for edge deployment. The results suggest that distilled diffusion models can retain much of the reconstruction behaviour of a stronger teacher while enabling substantially lower latency inference. The study is positioned as an initial step toward practical diffusion-based talking-head generation under constrained computational settings. GitHub: https://mazumdarsoumya.github.io/TempoSyncDiff
Mar 5, 2026

Accelerating Text-to-Video Generation with Calibrated Sparse Attention

Recent diffusion models enable high-quality video generation, but suffer from slow runtimes. The large transformer-based backbones used in these models are bottlenecked by spatiotemporal attention. In this paper, we identify that a significant fraction of token-to-token connections consistently yield negligible scores across various inputs, and their patterns often repeat across queries. Thus, the attention computation in these cases can be skipped with little to no effect on the result. This observation continues to hold for connections among local token blocks. Motivated by this, we introduce CalibAtt, a training-free method that accelerates video generation via calibrated sparse attention. CalibAtt performs an offline calibration pass that identifies block-level sparsity and repetition patterns that are stable across inputs, and compiles these patterns into optimized attention operations for each layer, head, and diffusion timestep. At inference time, we compute the selected input-dependent connections densely, and skip the unselected ones in a hardware-efficient manner. Extensive experiments on Wan 2.1 14B, Mochi 1, and few-step distilled models at various resolutions show that CalibAtt achieves up to 1.58x end-to-end speedup, outperforming existing training-free methods while maintaining video generation quality and text-video alignment.
Mar 5, 2026

Frequency-Aware Error-Bounded Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have emerged as the dominant architecture for high-quality image and video generation, yet their iterative denoising process incurs substantial computational cost during inference. Existing caching methods accelerate DiTs by reusing intermediate computations across timesteps, but they share a common limitation: treating the denoising process as uniform across time,depth, and feature dimensions. In this work, we identify three orthogonal axes of non-uniformity in DiT denoising: (1) temporal -- sensitivity to caching errors varies dramatically across the denoising trajectory; (2) depth -- consecutive caching decisions lead to cascading approximation errors; and (3) feature -- different components of the hidden state exhibit heterogeneous temporal dynamics. Based on these observations, we propose SpectralCache, a unified caching framework comprising Timestep-Aware Dynamic Scheduling (TADS), Cumulative Error Budgets (CEB), and Frequency-Decomposed Caching (FDC). On FLUX.1-schnell at 512x512 resolution, SpectralCache achieves 2.46x speedup with LPIPS 0.217 and SSIM 0.727, outperforming TeaCache (2.12x, LPIPS 0.215, SSIM 0.734) by 16% in speed while maintaining comparable quality (LPIPS difference < 1%). Our approach is training-free, plug-and-play, and compatible with existing DiT architectures.
Mar 5, 2026

Diff-ES: Stage-wise Structural Diffusion Pruning via Evolutionary Search

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in high-fidelity image generation but remain computationally demanding due to their multi-step denoising process and large model sizes. Although prior work improves efficiency either by reducing sampling steps or by compressing model parameters, existing structured pruning approaches still struggle to balance real acceleration and image quality preservation. In particular, prior methods such as MosaicDiff rely on heuristic, manually tuned stage-wise sparsity schedules and stitch multiple independently pruned models during inference, which increases memory overhead. However, the importance of diffusion steps is highly non-uniform and model-dependent. As a result, schedules derived from simple heuristics or empirical observations often fail to generalize and may lead to suboptimal performance. To this end, we introduce Diff-ES, a stage-wise structural Diffusion pruning framework via Evolutionary Search, which optimizes the stage-wise sparsity schedule and executes it through memory-efficient weight routing without model duplication. Diff-ES divides the diffusion trajectory into multiple stages, automatically discovers an optimal stage-wise sparsity schedule via evolutionary search, and activates stage-conditioned weights dynamically without duplicating model parameters. Our framework naturally integrates with existing structured pruning methods for diffusion models including depth and width pruning. Extensive experiments on DiT and SDXL demonstrate that Diff-ES consistently achieves wall-clock speedups while incurring minimal degradation in generation quality, establishing state-of-the-art performance for structured diffusion model pruning.
Mar 5, 2026

RBF-Solver: A Multistep Sampler for Diffusion Probabilistic Models via Radial Basis Functions

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are widely adopted for their outstanding generative fidelity, yet their sampling is computationally demanding. Polynomial-based multistep samplers mitigate this cost by accelerating inference; however, despite their theoretical accuracy guarantees, they generate the sampling trajectory according to a predefined scheme, providing no flexibility for further optimization. To address this limitation, we propose RBF-Solver, a multistep diffusion sampler that interpolates model evaluations with Gaussian radial basis functions (RBFs). By leveraging learnable shape parameters in Gaussian RBFs, RBF-Solver explicitly follows optimal sampling trajectories. At first order, it reduces to the Euler method (DDIM). At second order or higher, as the shape parameters approach infinity, RBF-Solver converges to the Adams method, ensuring its compatibility with existing samplers. Owing to the locality of Gaussian RBFs, RBF-Solver maintains high image fidelity even at fourth order or higher, where previous samplers deteriorate. For unconditional generation, RBF-Solver consistently outperforms polynomial-based samplers in the high-NFE regime (NFE >= 15). On CIFAR-10 with the Score-SDE model, it achieves an FID of 2.87 with 15 function evaluations and further improves to 2.48 with 40 function evaluations. For conditional ImageNet 256 x 256 generation with the Guided Diffusion model at a guidance scale 8.0, substantial gains are achieved in the low-NFE range (5-10), yielding a 16.12-33.73% reduction in FID relative to polynomial-based samplers.
Mar 4, 2026

Progressive Refinement Regulation for Accelerating Diffusion Language Model Decoding

Diffusion language models generate text through iterative denoising under a uniform refinement rule applied to all tokens. However, tokens stabilize at different rates in practice, leading to substantial redundant refinement and motivating refinement control over the denoising process. Existing approaches typically assess refinement necessity from instantaneous, step-level signals under a fixed decoding process. In contrast, whether a token has converged is defined by how its prediction changes along its future refinement trajectory. Moreover, changing the refinement rule reshapes future refinement trajectories, which in turn determine how refinement rules should be formulated, making refinement control inherently dynamic. We propose Progressive Refinement Regulation (PRR), a progressive, trajectory-grounded refinement control framework that derives a token-level notion of empirical convergence progress from full decoding rollouts. Based on this signal, PRR learns a lightweight token-wise controller to regulate refinement via temperature-based distribution shaping under a progressive self-evolving training scheme. Experiments show that PRR substantially accelerates diffusion language model decoding while preserving generation quality.
Mar 4, 2026

Helios: Real Real-Time Long Video Generation Model

We introduce Helios, the first 14B video generation model that runs at 19.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU and supports minute-scale generation while matching the quality of a strong baseline. We make breakthroughs along three key dimensions: (1) robustness to long-video drifting without commonly used anti-drifting heuristics such as self-forcing, error-banks, or keyframe sampling; (2) real-time generation without standard acceleration techniques such as KV-cache, sparse/linear attention, or quantization; and (3) training without parallelism or sharding frameworks, enabling image-diffusion-scale batch sizes while fitting up to four 14B models within 80 GB of GPU memory. Specifically, Helios is a 14B autoregressive diffusion model with a unified input representation that natively supports T2V, I2V, and V2V tasks. To mitigate drifting in long-video generation, we characterize typical failure modes and propose simple yet effective training strategies that explicitly simulate drifting during training, while eliminating repetitive motion at its source. For efficiency, we heavily compress the historical and noisy context and reduce the number of sampling steps, yielding computational costs comparable to -- or lower than -- those of 1.3B video generative models. Moreover, we introduce infrastructure-level optimizations that accelerate both inference and training while reducing memory consumption. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Helios consistently outperforms prior methods on both short- and long-video generation. We plan to release the code, base model, and distilled model to support further development by the community.
Mar 4, 2026

FastWave: Optimized Diffusion Model for Audio Super-Resolution

Audio Super-Resolution is a set of techniques aimed at high-quality estimation of the given signal as if it would be sampled with higher sample rate. Among suggested methods there are diffusion and flow models (which are considered slower), generative adversarial networks (which are considered faster), however both approaches are currently presented by high-parametric networks, requiring high computational costs both for training and inference. We propose a solution to both these problems by re-considering the recent advances in the training of diffusion models and applying them to super-resolution from any to 48 kHz sample rate. Our approach shows better results than NU-Wave 2 and is comparable to state-of-the-art models. Our model called FastWave has around 50 GFLOPs of computational complexity and 1.3 M parameters and can be trained with less resources and significantly faster than the majority of recently proposed diffusion- and flow-based solutions. The code has been made publicly available.
Mar 4, 2026

Beyond Masks: Efficient, Flexible Diffusion Language Models via Deletion-Insertion Processes

While Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) relying on token masking and unmasking have shown promise in language modeling, their computational efficiency and generation flexibility remain constrained by the masking paradigm. In this paper, we propose Deletion-Insertion Diffusion language models (DID) that rigorously formulate token deletion and insertion as discrete diffusion processes, replacing the masking and unmasking processes in current MDLMs. DID improves training and inference efficiency by eliminating two major sources of computational overhead in MDLMs: the computations on non-informative 1) <MASK> tokens inherent to the paradigm, and 2) <PAD> tokens introduced in variable-length settings. Furthermore, DID offers greater flexibility by: 1) natively supporting variable-length sequences without requiring fixed-length padding, and 2) an intrinsic self-correction mechanism during generation due to insertion that dynamically adjusts token positions. To train DID, we design a score-based approach that assigns scores to token insertion operations and derive appropriate training objectives. The objectives involve subsequence counting problems, which we efficiently solve via a parallelized dynamic programming algorithm. Our experiments across fixed and variable-length settings demonstrate the advantage of DID over baselines of MDLMs and existing insertion-based LMs, in terms of modeling performance, sampling quality, and training/inference speed, without any hyperparameter tuning.