Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kwon, Young D., Li, Rui, Li, Sijia, Li, Da, Bhattacharya, Sourav, Venieris, Stylianos I.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04663
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910037352382464
author Kwon, Young D.
Li, Rui
Li, Sijia
Li, Da
Bhattacharya, Sourav
Venieris, Stylianos I.
author_facet Kwon, Young D.
Li, Rui
Li, Sijia
Li, Da
Bhattacharya, Sourav
Venieris, Stylianos I.
contents State-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) achieve remarkable quality, yet their massive parameter scale (8-11B) poses significant challenges for inferences on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we present HierarchicalPrune, a novel compression framework grounded in a key observation: DM blocks exhibit distinct functional hierarchies, where early blocks establish semantic structures while later blocks handle texture refinements. HierarchicalPrune synergistically combines three techniques: (1) Hierarchical Position Pruning, which identifies and removes less essential later blocks based on position hierarchy; (2) Positional Weight Preservation, which systematically protects early model portions that are essential for semantic structural integrity; and (3) Sensitivity-Guided Distillation, which adjusts knowledge-transfer intensity based on our discovery of block-wise sensitivity variations. As a result, our framework brings billion-scale diffusion models into a range more suitable for on-device inference, while preserving the quality of the output images. Specifically, combined with INT4 weight quantisation, HierarchicalPrune achieves 77.5-80.4% memory footprint reduction (e.g., from 15.8 GB to 3.2 GB) and 27.9-38.0% latency reduction, measured on server and consumer grade GPUs, with the minimum drop of 2.6% in GenEval score and 7% in HPSv2 score compared to the original model. Finally, our comprehensive user study with 85 participants demonstrates that HierarchicalPrune maintains perceptual quality comparable to the original model while significantly outperforming prior works.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_04663
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HierarchicalPrune: Position-Aware Compression for Large-Scale Diffusion Models
Kwon, Young D.
Li, Rui
Li, Sijia
Li, Da
Bhattacharya, Sourav
Venieris, Stylianos I.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
State-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) achieve remarkable quality, yet their massive parameter scale (8-11B) poses significant challenges for inferences on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we present HierarchicalPrune, a novel compression framework grounded in a key observation: DM blocks exhibit distinct functional hierarchies, where early blocks establish semantic structures while later blocks handle texture refinements. HierarchicalPrune synergistically combines three techniques: (1) Hierarchical Position Pruning, which identifies and removes less essential later blocks based on position hierarchy; (2) Positional Weight Preservation, which systematically protects early model portions that are essential for semantic structural integrity; and (3) Sensitivity-Guided Distillation, which adjusts knowledge-transfer intensity based on our discovery of block-wise sensitivity variations. As a result, our framework brings billion-scale diffusion models into a range more suitable for on-device inference, while preserving the quality of the output images. Specifically, combined with INT4 weight quantisation, HierarchicalPrune achieves 77.5-80.4% memory footprint reduction (e.g., from 15.8 GB to 3.2 GB) and 27.9-38.0% latency reduction, measured on server and consumer grade GPUs, with the minimum drop of 2.6% in GenEval score and 7% in HPSv2 score compared to the original model. Finally, our comprehensive user study with 85 participants demonstrates that HierarchicalPrune maintains perceptual quality comparable to the original model while significantly outperforming prior works.
title HierarchicalPrune: Position-Aware Compression for Large-Scale Diffusion Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04663