Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: He, Haodong, Gao, Yuan, Zhang, Weizhong, Xia, Gui-Song
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19939
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910061313392640
author He, Haodong
Gao, Yuan
Zhang, Weizhong
Xia, Gui-Song
author_facet He, Haodong
Gao, Yuan
Zhang, Weizhong
Xia, Gui-Song
contents Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved great success in image generation but suffer from high inference latency due to their iterative denoising nature. Motivated by the evolving feature dynamics across the denoising trajectory, we propose a novel framework to optimize the computational graph of pre-trained DPMs on a per-timestep basis. By learning timestep-specific masks, our method dynamically determines which blocks to execute or bypass through feature reuse at each inference stage. Unlike global optimization methods that incur prohibitive memory costs via full-chain backpropagation, our method optimizes masks for each timestep independently, ensuring a memory-efficient training process. To guide this process, we introduce a timestep-aware loss scaling mechanism that prioritizes feature fidelity during sensitive denoising phases, complemented by a knowledge-guided mask rectification strategy to prune redundant spatial-temporal dependencies. Our approach is architecture-agnostic and demonstrates significant efficiency gains across a broad spectrum of models, including DDPM, LDM, DiT, and PixArt. Experimental results show that by treating the denoising process as a sequence of optimized computational paths, our method achieves a superior balance between sampling speed and generative quality. Our code will be released.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_19939
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Timestep-Aware Block Masking for Efficient Diffusion Model Inference
He, Haodong
Gao, Yuan
Zhang, Weizhong
Xia, Gui-Song
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved great success in image generation but suffer from high inference latency due to their iterative denoising nature. Motivated by the evolving feature dynamics across the denoising trajectory, we propose a novel framework to optimize the computational graph of pre-trained DPMs on a per-timestep basis. By learning timestep-specific masks, our method dynamically determines which blocks to execute or bypass through feature reuse at each inference stage. Unlike global optimization methods that incur prohibitive memory costs via full-chain backpropagation, our method optimizes masks for each timestep independently, ensuring a memory-efficient training process. To guide this process, we introduce a timestep-aware loss scaling mechanism that prioritizes feature fidelity during sensitive denoising phases, complemented by a knowledge-guided mask rectification strategy to prune redundant spatial-temporal dependencies. Our approach is architecture-agnostic and demonstrates significant efficiency gains across a broad spectrum of models, including DDPM, LDM, DiT, and PixArt. Experimental results show that by treating the denoising process as a sequence of optimized computational paths, our method achieves a superior balance between sampling speed and generative quality. Our code will be released.
title Timestep-Aware Block Masking for Efficient Diffusion Model Inference
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19939