Flexiffusion: Training-Free Segment-Wise Neural Architecture Search for Efficient Diffusion Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02488v2
• Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:47:53 GMT
• Title: Flexiffusion: Training-Free Segment-Wise Neural Architecture Search for Efficient Diffusion Models
• Authors: Hongtao Huang, Xiaojun Chang, Lina Yao,
• Abstract summary: Diffusion models (DMs) are powerful generative models capable of producing high-fidelity images but constrained by high computational costs.<n>We propose Flexiffusion, a training-free NAS framework that jointly optimize generation schedules and model architectures without modifying pre-trained parameters.<n>Our work pioneers a resource-efficient paradigm for searching high-speed DMs without sacrificing quality.
• Score: 50.260693393896716
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Diffusion models (DMs) are powerful generative models capable of producing high-fidelity images but are constrained by high computational costs due to iterative multi-step inference. While Neural Architecture Search (NAS) can optimize DMs, existing methods are hindered by retraining requirements, exponential search complexity from step-wise optimization, and slow evaluation relying on massive image generation. To address these challenges, we propose Flexiffusion, a training-free NAS framework that jointly optimizes generation schedules and model architectures without modifying pre-trained parameters. Our key insight is to decompose the generation process into flexible segments of equal length, where each segment dynamically combines three step types: full (complete computation), partial (cache-reused computation), and null (skipped computation). This segment-wise search space reduces the candidate pool exponentially compared to step-wise NAS while preserving architectural diversity. Further, we introduce relative FID (rFID), a lightweight evaluation metric for NAS that measures divergence from a teacher model's outputs instead of ground truth, slashing evaluation time by over $90\%$. In practice, Flexiffusion achieves at least $2\times$ acceleration across LDMs, Stable Diffusion, and DDPMs on ImageNet and MS-COCO, with FID degradation under $5\%$, outperforming prior NAS and caching methods. Notably, it attains $5.1\times$ speedup on Stable Diffusion with near-identical CLIP scores. Our work pioneers a resource-efficient paradigm for searching high-speed DMs without sacrificing quality.

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