Title: SRDiffusion: Accelerate Diffusion Inference via Sketching-Rendering Cooperation
Primary area: infrastructure, software libraries, hardware, systems, etc.
Keywords: video generation, diffusion models, inference acceleration

Abstract: Leveraging the diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture, models like Sora, CogVideoX and Wan have achieved remarkable progress in text-to-video, image-to-video, and video editing tasks. Despite these advances, diffusion-based video generation remains computationally intensive, especially for high-resolution, long-duration videos. Prior work accelerates its inference by skipping computation, usually at the cost of severe quality degradation. In this paper, we propose SRDiffusion, a novel framework that leverages collaboration between large and small models to reduce inference cost. The large model handles high-noise steps to ensure semantic and motion fidelity (Sketching), while the smaller model refines visual details in low-noise steps (Rendering). Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, over 3 $\times$ speedup for Wan with nearly no quality loss for VBench, and 2 $\times$ speedup for CogVideoX. Our method is introduced as a new direction orthogonal to existing acceleration strategies, offering a practical solution for scalable video generation.