“Beyond U: Making Diffusion Models Faster & Lighter”, Sergio Calvo-Ordonez, Jiahao Huang, Lipei Zhang, Guang Yang, Carola-Bibiane Schonlieb, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero2023-10-31 ()⁠:

Diffusion models are a family of generative models that yield record-breaking performance in tasks such as image synthesis, video generation, and molecule design. Despite their capabilities, their efficiency, especially in the reverse denoising process, remains a challenge due to slow convergence rates and high computational costs.

In this work, we introduce an approach that leverages continuous dynamical systems to design a novel denoising network for diffusion models that is more parameter-efficient, exhibits faster convergence, and demonstrates increased noise robustness.

Experimenting with denoising probabilistic diffusion models, our framework operates with ~a quarter of the parameters and 30% of the Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) compared to standard U-Nets in Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). Furthermore, our model is up to 70% faster in inference than the baseline models when measured in equal conditions while converging to better quality solutions.