Learning Few-Step Diffusion Models by Trajectory Distribution Matching
Authors: name: Yihong Luo; name: Tianyang Hu; name: Jiacheng Sun; name: Yujun Cai; name: Jing Tang
Published: 2025-03-09 15:53:49

Abstract: Accelerating diffusion model sampling is crucial for efficient AIGC
deployment. While diffusion distillation methods -- based on distribution
matching and trajectory matching -- reduce sampling to as few as one step, they
fall short on complex tasks like text-to-image generation. Few-step generation
offers a better balance between speed and quality, but existing approaches face
a persistent trade-off: distribution matching lacks flexibility for multi-step
sampling, while trajectory matching often yields suboptimal image quality. To
bridge this gap, we propose learning few-step diffusion models by Trajectory
Distribution Matching (TDM), a unified distillation paradigm that combines the
strengths of distribution and trajectory matching. Our method introduces a
data-free score distillation objective, aligning the student's trajectory with
the teacher's at the distribution level. Further, we develop a
sampling-steps-aware objective that decouples learning targets across different
steps, enabling more adjustable sampling. This approach supports both
deterministic sampling for superior image quality and flexible multi-step
adaptation, achieving state-of-the-art performance with remarkable efficiency.
Our model, TDM, outperforms existing methods on various backbones, such as SDXL
and PixArt-alpha, delivering superior quality and significantly reduced
training costs. In particular, our method distills PixArt-alpha into a
4-step generator that outperforms its teacher on real user preference at 1024
resolution. This is accomplished with 500 iterations and 2 A800 hours -- a mere
0.01% of the teacher's training cost. In addition, our proposed TDM can be
extended to accelerate text-to-video diffusion. Notably, TDM can outperform its
teacher model (CogVideoX-2B) by using only 4 NFE on VBench, improving the total
score from 80.91 to 81.65. Project page: https://tdm-t2x.github.io/