Evolutionary Caching to Accelerate Your Off-the-Shelf Diffusion Model
Authors: name: Anirud Aggarwal; name: Abhinav Shrivastava; name: Matthew Gwilliam
Published: 2025-06-18 17:59:50

Abstract: Diffusion-based image generation models excel at producing high-quality
synthetic content, but suffer from slow and computationally expensive
inference. Prior work has attempted to mitigate this by caching and reusing
features within diffusion transformers across inference steps. These methods,
however, often rely on rigid heuristics that result in limited acceleration or
poor generalization across architectures. We propose Evolutionary Caching to
Accelerate Diffusion models (ECAD), a genetic algorithm that learns efficient,
per-model, caching schedules forming a Pareto frontier, using only a small set
of calibration prompts. ECAD requires no modifications to network parameters or
reference images. It offers significant inference speedups, enables
fine-grained control over the quality-latency trade-off, and adapts seamlessly
to different diffusion models. Notably, ECAD's learned schedules can generalize
effectively to resolutions and model variants not seen during calibration. We
evaluate ECAD on PixArt-alpha, PixArt-Sigma, and FLUX-1.dev using multiple
metrics (FID, CLIP, Image Reward) across diverse benchmarks (COCO, MJHQ-30k,
PartiPrompts), demonstrating consistent improvements over previous approaches.
On PixArt-alpha, ECAD identifies a schedule that outperforms the previous
state-of-the-art method by 4.47 COCO FID while increasing inference speedup
from 2.35x to 2.58x. Our results establish ECAD as a scalable and generalizable
approach for accelerating diffusion inference. Our project website is available
at https://aniaggarwal.github.io/ecad and our code is available at
https://github.com/aniaggarwal/ecad.