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Main Authors: Lin, Haitao, Hu, Peiyan, Ren, Minsi, Gao, Zhifeng, Ma, Zhi-Ming, ke, Guolin, Wu, Tailin, Li, Stan Z.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11831
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author Lin, Haitao
Hu, Peiyan
Ren, Minsi
Gao, Zhifeng
Ma, Zhi-Ming
ke, Guolin
Wu, Tailin
Li, Stan Z.
author_facet Lin, Haitao
Hu, Peiyan
Ren, Minsi
Gao, Zhifeng
Ma, Zhi-Ming
ke, Guolin
Wu, Tailin
Li, Stan Z.
contents Recent advances in few-step diffusion models have demonstrated their efficiency and effectiveness by shortcutting the probabilistic paths of diffusion models, especially in training one-step diffusion models from scratch (\emph{a.k.a.} shortcut models). However, their theoretical derivation and practical implementation are often closely coupled, which obscures the design space. To address this, we propose a common design framework for representative shortcut models. This framework provides theoretical justification for their validity and disentangles concrete component-level choices, thereby enabling systematic identification of improvements. With our proposed improvements, the resulting one-step model achieves a new state-of-the-art FID50k of 2.85 on ImageNet-256x256 under the classifier-free guidance setting with one step generation, and further reaches FID50k of 2.53 with 2x training steps. Remarkably, the model requires no pre-training, distillation, or curriculum learning. We believe our work lowers the barrier to component-level innovation in shortcut models and facilitates principled exploration of their design space.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11831
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Design of One-step Diffusion via Shortcutting Flow Paths
Lin, Haitao
Hu, Peiyan
Ren, Minsi
Gao, Zhifeng
Ma, Zhi-Ming
ke, Guolin
Wu, Tailin
Li, Stan Z.
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent advances in few-step diffusion models have demonstrated their efficiency and effectiveness by shortcutting the probabilistic paths of diffusion models, especially in training one-step diffusion models from scratch (\emph{a.k.a.} shortcut models). However, their theoretical derivation and practical implementation are often closely coupled, which obscures the design space. To address this, we propose a common design framework for representative shortcut models. This framework provides theoretical justification for their validity and disentangles concrete component-level choices, thereby enabling systematic identification of improvements. With our proposed improvements, the resulting one-step model achieves a new state-of-the-art FID50k of 2.85 on ImageNet-256x256 under the classifier-free guidance setting with one step generation, and further reaches FID50k of 2.53 with 2x training steps. Remarkably, the model requires no pre-training, distillation, or curriculum learning. We believe our work lowers the barrier to component-level innovation in shortcut models and facilitates principled exploration of their design space.
title On the Design of One-step Diffusion via Shortcutting Flow Paths
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11831