Progressive Knowledge Distillation Of Stable Diffusion XL Using Layer
  Level Loss
Yatharth Gupta Vishnu V. Jaddipal Harish Prabhala Sayak Paul Patrick Von Platen
Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) has become the best open source text-to-image
model (T2I) for its versatility and top-notch image quality. Efficiently
addressing the computational demands of SDXL models is crucial for wider reach
and applicability. In this work, we introduce two scaled-down variants, Segmind
Stable Diffusion (SSD-1B) and Segmind-Vega, with 1.3B and 0.74B parameter
UNets, respectively, achieved through progressive removal using layer-level
losses focusing on reducing the model size while preserving generative quality.
We release these models weights at https://hf.co/Segmind. Our methodology
involves the elimination of residual networks and transformer blocks from the
U-Net structure of SDXL, resulting in significant reductions in parameters, and
latency. Our compact models effectively emulate the original SDXL by
capitalizing on transferred knowledge, achieving competitive results against
larger multi-billion parameter SDXL. Our work underscores the efficacy of
knowledge distillation coupled with layer-level losses in reducing model size
while preserving the high-quality generative capabilities of SDXL, thus
facilitating more accessible deployment in resource-constrained environments.