AdaDiff: Adaptive Step Selection for Fast Diffusion
Hui Zhang Zuxuan Wu Zhen Xing Jie Shao Yu-Gang Jiang
Diffusion models, as a type of generative models, have achieved impressive
results in generating images and videos conditioned on textual conditions.
However, the generation process of diffusion models involves denoising for
dozens of steps to produce photorealistic images/videos, which is
computationally expensive. Unlike previous methods that design
``one-size-fits-all'' approaches for speed up, we argue denoising steps should
be sample-specific conditioned on the richness of input texts. To this end, we
introduce AdaDiff, a lightweight framework designed to learn instance-specific
step usage policies, which are then used by the diffusion model for generation.
AdaDiff is optimized using a policy gradient method to maximize a carefully
designed reward function, balancing inference time and generation quality. We
conduct experiments on three image generation and two video generation
benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach achieves similar results in terms
of visual quality compared to the baseline using a fixed 50 denoising steps
while reducing inference time by at least 33%, going as high as 40%.
Furthermore, our qualitative analysis shows that our method allocates more
steps to more informative text conditions and fewer steps to simpler text
conditions.