Training-free Diffusion Acceleration with Bottleneck Sampling
Authors: name: Ye Tian; name: Xin Xia; name: Yuxi Ren; name: Shanchuan Lin; name: Xing Wang; name: Xuefeng Xiao; name: Yunhai Tong; name: Ling Yang; name: Bin Cui
Published: 2025-03-24 17:59:02

Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual content
generation but remain challenging to deploy due to their high computational
cost during inference. This computational burden primarily arises from the
quadratic complexity of self-attention with respect to image or video
resolution. While existing acceleration methods often compromise output quality
or necessitate costly retraining, we observe that most diffusion models are
pre-trained at lower resolutions, presenting an opportunity to exploit these
low-resolution priors for more efficient inference without degrading
performance. In this work, we introduce Bottleneck Sampling, a training-free
framework that leverages low-resolution priors to reduce computational overhead
while preserving output fidelity. Bottleneck Sampling follows a high-low-high
denoising workflow: it performs high-resolution denoising in the initial and
final stages while operating at lower resolutions in intermediate steps. To
mitigate aliasing and blurring artifacts, we further refine the resolution
transition points and adaptively shift the denoising timesteps at each stage.
We evaluate Bottleneck Sampling on both image and video generation tasks, where
extensive experiments demonstrate that it accelerates inference by up to
3times for image generation and 2.5times for video generation, all while
maintaining output quality comparable to the standard full-resolution sampling
process across multiple evaluation metrics. Code is available at:
https://github.com/tyfeld/Bottleneck-Sampling