EdgeFusion: On-Device Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: name: Thibault Castells, name: Hyoung-Kyu Song, name: Tairen Piao, name: Shinkook Choi, name: Bo-Kyeong Kim, name: Hanyoung Yim, name: Changgwun Lee, name: Jae Gon Kim, name: Tae-Ho Kim

The intensive computational burden of Stable Diffusion (SD) for text-to-image
generation poses a significant hurdle for its practical application. To tackle
this challenge, recent research focuses on methods to reduce sampling steps,
such as Latent Consistency Model (LCM), and on employing architectural
optimizations, including pruning and knowledge distillation. Diverging from
existing approaches, we uniquely start with a compact SD variant, BK-SDM. We
observe that directly applying LCM to BK-SDM with commonly used crawled
datasets yields unsatisfactory results. It leads us to develop two strategies:
(1) leveraging high-quality image-text pairs from leading generative models and
(2) designing an advanced distillation process tailored for LCM. Through our
thorough exploration of quantization, profiling, and on-device deployment, we
achieve rapid generation of photo-realistic, text-aligned images in just two
steps, with latency under one second on resource-limited edge devices.