Heterogeneous Decentralized Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jiang, Zhiying, Seraj, Raihan, Villagra, Marcos, Roy, Bidhan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Jiang, Zhiying
Seraj, Raihan
Villagra, Marcos
Roy, Bidhan
author_facet Jiang, Zhiying
Seraj, Raihan
Villagra, Marcos
Roy, Bidhan
contents Training frontier-scale diffusion models often requires substantial computational resources concentrated in tightly-coupled clusters, limiting participation to well-resourced institutions. While Decentralized Diffusion Models (DDM) enable training multiple experts in isolation, existing approaches require 1176 GPU-days and homogeneous training objectives across all experts. We present an efficient framework that dramatically reduces resource requirements while supporting heterogeneous training objectives. Our approach combines three key contributions: (1) a heterogeneous decentralized training paradigm that allows experts to use different objectives (DDPM and Flow Matching), unified at inference time without any retraining; (2) pretrained checkpoint conversion from ImageNet-DDPM to Flow Matching objectives, accelerating convergence and enabling initialization without objective-specific pretraining; and (3) PixArt-$α$'s efficient AdaLN-Single architecture, reducing parameters while maintaining quality. Experiments on LAION-Aesthetics show that, relative to the training scale reported for prior DDM work, our approach reduces the compute by 16$\times$ and data by 14$\times$. Under aligned inference settings, our heterogeneous configuration achieves better FID and higher intra-prompt diversity than the homogeneous baseline. By eliminating synchronization requirements and enabling mixed DDPM/FM objectives, our framework makes decentralized generative model training accessible to contributors with single GPUs requiring only 24--48GB VRAM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_06741
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Heterogeneous Decentralized Diffusion Models
Jiang, Zhiying
Seraj, Raihan
Villagra, Marcos
Roy, Bidhan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Training frontier-scale diffusion models often requires substantial computational resources concentrated in tightly-coupled clusters, limiting participation to well-resourced institutions. While Decentralized Diffusion Models (DDM) enable training multiple experts in isolation, existing approaches require 1176 GPU-days and homogeneous training objectives across all experts. We present an efficient framework that dramatically reduces resource requirements while supporting heterogeneous training objectives. Our approach combines three key contributions: (1) a heterogeneous decentralized training paradigm that allows experts to use different objectives (DDPM and Flow Matching), unified at inference time without any retraining; (2) pretrained checkpoint conversion from ImageNet-DDPM to Flow Matching objectives, accelerating convergence and enabling initialization without objective-specific pretraining; and (3) PixArt-$α$'s efficient AdaLN-Single architecture, reducing parameters while maintaining quality. Experiments on LAION-Aesthetics show that, relative to the training scale reported for prior DDM work, our approach reduces the compute by 16$\times$ and data by 14$\times$. Under aligned inference settings, our heterogeneous configuration achieves better FID and higher intra-prompt diversity than the homogeneous baseline. By eliminating synchronization requirements and enabling mixed DDPM/FM objectives, our framework makes decentralized generative model training accessible to contributors with single GPUs requiring only 24--48GB VRAM.
title Heterogeneous Decentralized Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06741