LightGen: Efficient Image Generation through Knowledge Distillation and
  Direct Preference Optimization
Authors: name: Xianfeng Wu; name: Yajing Bai; name: Haoze Zheng; name: Harold Haodong Chen; name: Yexin Liu; name: Zihao Wang; name: Xuran Ma; name: Wen-Jie Shu; name: Xianzu Wu; name: Harry Yang; name: Ser-Nam Lim
Published: 2025-03-11 16:58:02

Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-image generation have primarily relied on
extensive datasets and parameter-heavy architectures. These requirements
severely limit accessibility for researchers and practitioners who lack
substantial computational resources. In this paper, we introduce \model, an
efficient training paradigm for image generation models that uses knowledge
distillation (KD) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Drawing inspiration
from the success of data KD techniques widely adopted in Multi-Modal Large
Language Models (MLLMs), LightGen distills knowledge from state-of-the-art
(SOTA) text-to-image models into a compact Masked Autoregressive (MAR)
architecture with only 0.7B parameters. Using a compact synthetic dataset of
just 2M high-quality images generated from varied captions, we demonstrate
that data diversity significantly outweighs data volume in determining model
performance. This strategy dramatically reduces computational demands and
reduces pre-training time from potentially thousands of GPU-days to merely 88
GPU-days. Furthermore, to address the inherent shortcomings of synthetic data,
particularly poor high-frequency details and spatial inaccuracies, we integrate
the DPO technique that refines image fidelity and positional accuracy.
Comprehensive experiments confirm that LightGen achieves image generation
quality comparable to SOTA models while significantly reducing computational
resources and expanding accessibility for resource-constrained environments.
Code is available at https://github.com/XianfengWu01/LightGen