Cross-Space Distillation: Teaching One-Step Students with Modern Diffusion Teachers
Authors: name: Anh Nguyen, name: Ngan Nguyen, name: Duc Vu, name: Trung Dao, name: Viet Nguyen, name: Quan Dao, name: Kien Nguyen, name: Chi Tran, name: Phong Nguyen, name: Khoi Nguyen, name: Cuong Pham, name: Dimitris Metaxas, name: Vishal M. Patel, name: Anh Tran

Modern one-step diffusion models achieve impressive quality through distribution-based timestep distillation. Yet, they rely on a critical assumption: Teacher and Student must inhabit the same latent space. This Shared-Space constraint prevents knowledge transfer from modern high-capacity Teachers (e.g., SD 3.5 and Flux) into compact, deployment-friendly Students such as SD 1.5, whose latent resolution and VAE parameterization differ from the Teacher. We formalize this overlooked regime as Cross-Space Distillation, where Teacher and Student differ in both latent resolution and VAE space. To enable distillation under this mismatch, we introduce the Bridge, a lightweight latent interface that maps Student latents into the Teacher space without modifying the Student backbone. Bridge combines a frozen Student VAE decoder as a spatial prior with a compact learnable projector, and is trained with latent reconstruction and attention fidelity objectives for stable Teacher-space alignment. Across diverse modern Teachers, Bridge enables substantial gains for compact one-step Students; for example, it improves SD 1.5 from 5.4 to 9.4 HPSv3 while preserving one-step inference, low latency, and broad ecosystem compatibility. These results show that heterogeneous large Teachers can be distilled into efficient, deployable backbones through a lightweight latent-space interface.