Diffusion Probabilistic Model Made Slim
Authors: Xingyi Yang, Daquan Zhou, Jiashi Feng, Xinchao Wang

Despite the visually-pleasing results achieved, the massive computational cost has been a long-standing flaw for diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs), which, in turn, greatly limits their applications on resource-limited platforms. Prior methods towards efficient DPM, however, have largely focused on accelerating the testing yet overlooked their huge complexity and size. In this paper, we make a dedicated attempt to lighten DPM while striving to preserve its favourable performance. We start by training a small-sized latent diffusion model (LDM) from scratch but observe a significant fidelity drop in the synthetic images. Through a thorough assessment, we find that DPM is intrinsically biased against high-frequency generation, and learns to recover different frequency components at different time-steps. These properties make compact networks unable to represent frequency dynamics with accurate high-frequency estimation. Towards this end, we introduce a customized design for slim DPM, which we term as Spectral Diffusion (SD), for lightweight image synthesis. SD incorporates wavelet gating in its architecture to enable frequency dynamic feature extraction at every reverse steps, and conducts spectrum-aware distillation to promote high-frequency recovery by inverse weighting the objective based on spectrum magnitudes. Experimental results demonstrate that, SD achieves 8-18x computational complexity reduction as compared to the latent diffusion models on a series of conditional and unconditional image generation tasks while retaining competitive image fidelity.