Towards More Accurate Diffusion Model Acceleration with A Timestep Tuner

A diffusion model, which is formulated to produce an image using thousands of denoising steps, usually suffers from a slow inference speed. Existing acceleration algorithms simplify the sampling by skipping most steps yet observe considerable performance degradation. By viewing the generation of diffusion models as a discretized integrating process, we argue that the quality drop is partly caused by applying an inaccurate integral direction to a timestep interval. To rectify such inaccuracy, we propose a $\textbf{timestep aligner}$ that helps find a more accurate integral direction for a particular interval at the minimum cost. Specifically, at each denoising step, we replace the original parameterization by conditioning the network on a new timestep, which is obtained by aligning the sampling distribution to the real distribution. Extensive experiments show that our plug-in design can be trained efficiently and boost the inference performance of various state-of-the-art acceleration methods, especially for the one with few denoising steps. For example, when using 10 denoising steps on the popular LSUN Bedroom dataset, we improve the FID of DDIM from 9.65 to 6.07, simply by adopting our method for a more appropriate set of timesteps. Code will be made publicly available.