Scaling Diffusion Transformers Efficiently via $μ$P

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zheng, Chenyu, Zhang, Xinyu, Wang, Rongzhen, Huang, Wei, Tian, Zhi, Huang, Weilin, Zhu, Jun, Li, Chongxuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zheng, Chenyu
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Rongzhen
Huang, Wei
Tian, Zhi
Huang, Weilin
Zhu, Jun
Li, Chongxuan
author_facet Zheng, Chenyu
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Rongzhen
Huang, Wei
Tian, Zhi
Huang, Weilin
Zhu, Jun
Li, Chongxuan
contents Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the foundation for vision generative models, but their scalability is limited by the high cost of hyperparameter (HP) tuning at large scales. Recently, Maximal Update Parametrization ($μ$P) was proposed for vanilla Transformers, which enables stable HP transfer from small to large language models, and dramatically reduces tuning costs. However, it remains unclear whether $μ$P of vanilla Transformers extends to diffusion Transformers, which differ architecturally and objectively. In this work, we generalize standard $μ$P to diffusion Transformers and validate its effectiveness through large-scale experiments. First, we rigorously prove that $μ$P of mainstream diffusion Transformers, including U-ViT, DiT, PixArt-$α$, and MMDiT, aligns with that of the vanilla Transformer, enabling the direct application of existing $μ$P methodologies. Leveraging this result, we systematically demonstrate that DiT-$μ$P enjoys robust HP transferability. Notably, DiT-XL-2-$μ$P with transferred learning rate achieves 2.9 times faster convergence than the original DiT-XL-2. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of $μ$P on text-to-image generation by scaling PixArt-$α$ from 0.04B to 0.61B and MMDiT from 0.18B to 18B. In both cases, models under $μ$P outperform their respective baselines while requiring small tuning cost, only 5.5% of one training run for PixArt-$α$ and 3% of consumption by human experts for MMDiT-18B. These results establish $μ$P as a principled and efficient framework for scaling diffusion Transformers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15270
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling Diffusion Transformers Efficiently via $μ$P
Zheng, Chenyu
Zhang, Xinyu
Wang, Rongzhen
Huang, Wei
Tian, Zhi
Huang, Weilin
Zhu, Jun
Li, Chongxuan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the foundation for vision generative models, but their scalability is limited by the high cost of hyperparameter (HP) tuning at large scales. Recently, Maximal Update Parametrization ($μ$P) was proposed for vanilla Transformers, which enables stable HP transfer from small to large language models, and dramatically reduces tuning costs. However, it remains unclear whether $μ$P of vanilla Transformers extends to diffusion Transformers, which differ architecturally and objectively. In this work, we generalize standard $μ$P to diffusion Transformers and validate its effectiveness through large-scale experiments. First, we rigorously prove that $μ$P of mainstream diffusion Transformers, including U-ViT, DiT, PixArt-$α$, and MMDiT, aligns with that of the vanilla Transformer, enabling the direct application of existing $μ$P methodologies. Leveraging this result, we systematically demonstrate that DiT-$μ$P enjoys robust HP transferability. Notably, DiT-XL-2-$μ$P with transferred learning rate achieves 2.9 times faster convergence than the original DiT-XL-2. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of $μ$P on text-to-image generation by scaling PixArt-$α$ from 0.04B to 0.61B and MMDiT from 0.18B to 18B. In both cases, models under $μ$P outperform their respective baselines while requiring small tuning cost, only 5.5% of one training run for PixArt-$α$ and 3% of consumption by human experts for MMDiT-18B. These results establish $μ$P as a principled and efficient framework for scaling diffusion Transformers.
title Scaling Diffusion Transformers Efficiently via $μ$P
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15270