Accelerating Diffusion Model Training under Minimal Budgets: A Condensation-Based Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Rui, Shao, Shitong, Zhou, Zikai, Zhao, Pukun, Guo, Hangyu, Ye, Tian, Bai, Lichen, Yang, Shuo, Xie, Zeke
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huang, Rui
Shao, Shitong
Zhou, Zikai
Zhao, Pukun
Guo, Hangyu
Ye, Tian
Bai, Lichen
Yang, Shuo
Xie, Zeke
author_facet Huang, Rui
Shao, Shitong
Zhou, Zikai
Zhao, Pukun
Guo, Hangyu
Ye, Tian
Bai, Lichen
Yang, Shuo
Xie, Zeke
contents Diffusion models have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of generative tasks, yet training them from scratch is notoriously resource-intensive, typically requiring millions of training images and many GPU days. Motivated by a data-centric view of this bottleneck, we adopt a condensation-based perspective: given a large training set, the goal is to construct a much smaller condensed dataset that still supports training strong diffusion models under minimal data and compute budgets. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Diffusion Dataset Condensation (D2C), a two-phase framework comprising Select and Attach. In the Select phase, a diffusion difficulty score combined with interval sampling is used to identify a compact, informative training subset from the original data. Building on this subset, the Attach phase further strengthens the conditional signals by augmenting each selected image with rich semantic and visual representations. To our knowledge, D2C is the first framework that systematically investigates dataset condensation for diffusion models, whereas prior condensation methods have mainly targeted discriminative architectures. Extensive experiments across data budgets (0.8%-8% of ImageNet), model architectures, and image resolutions demonstrate that D2C dramatically accelerates diffusion model training while preserving high generative quality. On ImageNet 256x256 with SiT-XL/2, D2C attains an FID of 4.3 in just 40k steps using only 0.8% of the training images, corresponding to about 233x and 100x faster training than vanilla SiT-XL/2 and SiT-XL/2 + REPA, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05914
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating Diffusion Model Training under Minimal Budgets: A Condensation-Based Perspective
Huang, Rui
Shao, Shitong
Zhou, Zikai
Zhao, Pukun
Guo, Hangyu
Ye, Tian
Bai, Lichen
Yang, Shuo
Xie, Zeke
Machine Learning
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of generative tasks, yet training them from scratch is notoriously resource-intensive, typically requiring millions of training images and many GPU days. Motivated by a data-centric view of this bottleneck, we adopt a condensation-based perspective: given a large training set, the goal is to construct a much smaller condensed dataset that still supports training strong diffusion models under minimal data and compute budgets. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Diffusion Dataset Condensation (D2C), a two-phase framework comprising Select and Attach. In the Select phase, a diffusion difficulty score combined with interval sampling is used to identify a compact, informative training subset from the original data. Building on this subset, the Attach phase further strengthens the conditional signals by augmenting each selected image with rich semantic and visual representations. To our knowledge, D2C is the first framework that systematically investigates dataset condensation for diffusion models, whereas prior condensation methods have mainly targeted discriminative architectures. Extensive experiments across data budgets (0.8%-8% of ImageNet), model architectures, and image resolutions demonstrate that D2C dramatically accelerates diffusion model training while preserving high generative quality. On ImageNet 256x256 with SiT-XL/2, D2C attains an FID of 4.3 in just 40k steps using only 0.8% of the training images, corresponding to about 233x and 100x faster training than vanilla SiT-XL/2 and SiT-XL/2 + REPA, respectively.
title Accelerating Diffusion Model Training under Minimal Budgets: A Condensation-Based Perspective
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05914