Differentiable Solver Search for Fast Diffusion Sampling
Authors: name: Shuai Wang; name: Zexian Li; name: Qipeng zhang; name: Tianhui Song; name: Xubin Li; name: Tiezheng Ge; name: Bo Zheng; name: Limin Wang
Published: 2025-05-27 12:33:43

Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable generation quality but at the
cost of numerous function evaluations. Recently, advanced ODE-based solvers
have been developed to mitigate the substantial computational demands of
reverse-diffusion solving under limited sampling steps. However, these solvers,
heavily inspired by Adams-like multistep methods, rely solely on t-related
Lagrange interpolation. We show that t-related Lagrange interpolation is
suboptimal for diffusion model and reveal a compact search space comprised of
time steps and solver coefficients. Building on our analysis, we propose a
novel differentiable solver search algorithm to identify more optimal solver.
Equipped with the searched solver, rectified-flow models, e.g., SiT-XL/2 and
FlowDCN-XL/2, achieve FID scores of 2.40 and 2.35, respectively, on ImageNet256
with only 10 steps. Meanwhile, DDPM model, DiT-XL/2, reaches a FID score of
2.33 with only 10 steps. Notably, our searched solver outperforms traditional
solvers by a significant margin. Moreover, our searched solver demonstrates
generality across various model architectures, resolutions, and model sizes.