Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wan, Ben, Zheng, Tianyi, Chen, Zhaoyu, Wang, Yuxiao, Wang, Jia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09464
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910786873458688
author Wan, Ben
Zheng, Tianyi
Chen, Zhaoyu
Wang, Yuxiao
Wang, Jia
author_facet Wan, Ben
Zheng, Tianyi
Chen, Zhaoyu
Wang, Yuxiao
Wang, Jia
contents Diffusion Models (DMs) have impressive capabilities among generation models, but are limited to slower inference speeds and higher computational costs. Previous works utilize one-shot structure pruning to derive lightweight DMs from pre-trained ones, but this approach often leads to a significant drop in generation quality and may result in the removal of crucial weights. Thus we propose a iterative pruning method based on gradient flow, including the gradient flow pruning process and the gradient flow pruning criterion. We employ a progressive soft pruning strategy to maintain the continuity of the mask matrix and guide it along the gradient flow of the energy function based on the pruning criterion in sparse space, thereby avoiding the sudden information loss typically caused by one-shot pruning. Gradient-flow based criterion prune parameters whose removal increases the gradient norm of loss function and can enable fast convergence for a pruned model in iterative pruning stage. Our extensive experiments on widely used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in efficiency and consistency with pre-trained models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_09464
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pruning for Sparse Diffusion Models based on Gradient Flow
Wan, Ben
Zheng, Tianyi
Chen, Zhaoyu
Wang, Yuxiao
Wang, Jia
Machine Learning
Diffusion Models (DMs) have impressive capabilities among generation models, but are limited to slower inference speeds and higher computational costs. Previous works utilize one-shot structure pruning to derive lightweight DMs from pre-trained ones, but this approach often leads to a significant drop in generation quality and may result in the removal of crucial weights. Thus we propose a iterative pruning method based on gradient flow, including the gradient flow pruning process and the gradient flow pruning criterion. We employ a progressive soft pruning strategy to maintain the continuity of the mask matrix and guide it along the gradient flow of the energy function based on the pruning criterion in sparse space, thereby avoiding the sudden information loss typically caused by one-shot pruning. Gradient-flow based criterion prune parameters whose removal increases the gradient norm of loss function and can enable fast convergence for a pruned model in iterative pruning stage. Our extensive experiments on widely used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in efficiency and consistency with pre-trained models.
title Pruning for Sparse Diffusion Models based on Gradient Flow
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09464