CDM migrates distribution matching distillation to continuous time via dynamic random-length schedules and active off-trajectory latent alignment, yielding competitive few-step image fidelity on SD3 and Longcat-Image.
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Progressive Distillation for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models
Canonical reference. 72% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
Diffusion models have recently shown great promise for generative modeling, outperforming GANs on perceptual quality and autoregressive models at density estimation. A remaining downside is their slow sampling time: generating high quality samples takes many hundreds or thousands of model evaluations. Here we make two contributions to help eliminate this downside: First, we present new parameterizations of diffusion models that provide increased stability when using few sampling steps. Second, we present a method to distill a trained deterministic diffusion sampler, using many steps, into a new diffusion model that takes half as many sampling steps. We then keep progressively applying this distillation procedure to our model, halving the number of required sampling steps each time. On standard image generation benchmarks like CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and LSUN, we start out with state-of-the-art samplers taking as many as 8192 steps, and are able to distill down to models taking as few as 4 steps without losing much perceptual quality; achieving, for example, a FID of 3.0 on CIFAR-10 in 4 steps. Finally, we show that the full progressive distillation procedure does not take more time than it takes to train the original model, thus representing an efficient solution for generative modeling using diffusion at both train and test time.
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- abstract Diffusion models have recently shown great promise for generative modeling, outperforming GANs on perceptual quality and autoregressive models at density estimation. A remaining downside is their slow sampling time: generating high quality samples takes many hundreds or thousands of model evaluations. Here we make two contributions to help eliminate this downside: First, we present new parameterizations of diffusion models that provide increased stability when using few sampling steps. Second, we present a method to distill a trained deterministic diffusion sampler, using many steps, into a ne
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representative citing papers
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A hypernetwork maps style motion embeddings to LoRA updates that stylize text-driven motion diffusion models with improved generalization to unseen styles via contrastive structuring of the style space.
W-Flow achieves state-of-the-art one-step ImageNet 256x256 generation at 1.29 FID by training a static neural network to follow a Wasserstein gradient flow that minimizes Sinkhorn divergence, delivering roughly 100x faster sampling than comparable multi-step models.
Muninn accelerates diffusion trajectory planners up to 4.6x by spending an uncertainty budget to decide when to cache denoiser outputs, preserving performance and certifying bounded deviation from full computation.
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ActDiff-VC achieves up to 64.6% bitrate reduction at matched NIQE and improves perceptual metrics like KID and FID by using content-adaptive keyframe selection and budget-aware sparse trajectory selection to condition a diffusion decoder for ultra-low-bitrate video reconstruction.
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CF-VLA uses a coarse initialization over endpoint velocity followed by single-step refinement to achieve strong performance with low inference steps on CALVIN, LIBERO, and real-robot tasks.
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