Early-Bird Diffusion: Investigating and Leveraging Timestep-Aware Early-Bird Tickets in Diffusion Models for Efficient Training

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Hauptverfasser: Whalen, Lexington, Du, Zhenbang, You, Haoran, Li, Chaojian, Li, Sixu, Yingyan, Lin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Whalen, Lexington
Du, Zhenbang
You, Haoran
Li, Chaojian
Li, Sixu
Yingyan
Lin
author_facet Whalen, Lexington
Du, Zhenbang
You, Haoran
Li, Chaojian
Li, Sixu
Yingyan
Lin
contents Training diffusion models (DMs) requires substantial computational resources due to multiple forward and backward passes across numerous timesteps, motivating research into efficient training techniques. In this paper, we propose EB-Diff-Train, a new efficient DM training approach that is orthogonal to other methods of accelerating DM training, by investigating and leveraging Early-Bird (EB) tickets -- sparse subnetworks that manifest early in the training process and maintain high generation quality. We first investigate the existence of traditional EB tickets in DMs, enabling competitive generation quality without fully training a dense model. Then, we delve into the concept of diffusion-dedicated EB tickets, drawing on insights from varying importance of different timestep regions. These tickets adapt their sparsity levels according to the importance of corresponding timestep regions, allowing for aggressive sparsity during non-critical regions while conserving computational resources for crucial timestep regions. Building on this, we develop an efficient DM training technique that derives timestep-aware EB tickets, trains them in parallel, and combines them during inference for image generation. Extensive experiments validate the existence of both traditional and timestep-aware EB tickets, as well as the effectiveness of our proposed EB-Diff-Train method. This approach can significantly reduce training time both spatially and temporally -- achieving 2.9$\times$ to 5.8$\times$ speedups over training unpruned dense models, and up to 10.3$\times$ faster training compared to standard train-prune-finetune pipelines -- without compromising generative quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/Early-Bird-Diffusion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09606
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Early-Bird Diffusion: Investigating and Leveraging Timestep-Aware Early-Bird Tickets in Diffusion Models for Efficient Training
Whalen, Lexington
Du, Zhenbang
You, Haoran
Li, Chaojian
Li, Sixu
Yingyan
Lin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Training diffusion models (DMs) requires substantial computational resources due to multiple forward and backward passes across numerous timesteps, motivating research into efficient training techniques. In this paper, we propose EB-Diff-Train, a new efficient DM training approach that is orthogonal to other methods of accelerating DM training, by investigating and leveraging Early-Bird (EB) tickets -- sparse subnetworks that manifest early in the training process and maintain high generation quality. We first investigate the existence of traditional EB tickets in DMs, enabling competitive generation quality without fully training a dense model. Then, we delve into the concept of diffusion-dedicated EB tickets, drawing on insights from varying importance of different timestep regions. These tickets adapt their sparsity levels according to the importance of corresponding timestep regions, allowing for aggressive sparsity during non-critical regions while conserving computational resources for crucial timestep regions. Building on this, we develop an efficient DM training technique that derives timestep-aware EB tickets, trains them in parallel, and combines them during inference for image generation. Extensive experiments validate the existence of both traditional and timestep-aware EB tickets, as well as the effectiveness of our proposed EB-Diff-Train method. This approach can significantly reduce training time both spatially and temporally -- achieving 2.9$\times$ to 5.8$\times$ speedups over training unpruned dense models, and up to 10.3$\times$ faster training compared to standard train-prune-finetune pipelines -- without compromising generative quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/Early-Bird-Diffusion.
title Early-Bird Diffusion: Investigating and Leveraging Timestep-Aware Early-Bird Tickets in Diffusion Models for Efficient Training
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09606