9.0CVMay 26
SoftCap: Soft-Budget Control for Diffusion Transformer AccelerationYuhang Zhang, Junxiang Qiu, Huixia Ben et al.
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve strong visual quality, but their iterative denoising process requires many costly Transformer evaluations. Training-free acceleration methods reduce this cost by caching, forecasting, or verifying intermediate features, yet the runtime decision of when to execute a Full step is often driven by fixed schedules or hand-tuned thresholds. We propose \textbf{SoftCap}, a training-free control layer for cache-based DiT inference. SoftCap couples a Trajectory Drift Observer, which estimates local cache risk from lightweight hidden-state statistics, with a Soft-Budget PI Controller, which adjusts the Full-triggering threshold from realized compute relative to a fixed reference profile. The budget is a soft ceiling: it shapes the threshold but does not require a run to spend a prescribed number of Full evaluations. On FLUX.1-dev, SoftCap improves over SpeCa at a comparable middle-compute operating point, raising ImageReward from 0.967 to 0.981 and reducing LPIPS-Full from 0.518 to 0.498 at nearly identical FLOPs, while target-sweep diagnostics show the intended soft-ceiling behavior as the budget is relaxed.
6.2CVNov 14, 2025
Accelerating Controllable Generation via Hybrid-grained CacheLin Liu, Huixia Ben, Shuo Wang et al.
Controllable generative models have been widely used to improve the realism of synthetic visual content. However, such models must handle control conditions and content generation computational requirements, resulting in generally low generation efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a Hybrid-Grained Cache (HGC) approach that reduces computational overhead by adopting cache strategies with different granularities at different computational stages. Specifically, (1) we use a coarse-grained cache (block-level) based on feature reuse to dynamically bypass redundant computations in encoder-decoder blocks between each step of model reasoning. (2) We design a fine-grained cache (prompt-level) that acts within a module, where the fine-grained cache reuses cross-attention maps within consecutive reasoning steps and extends them to the corresponding module computations of adjacent steps. These caches of different granularities can be seamlessly integrated into each computational link of the controllable generation process. We verify the effectiveness of HGC on four benchmark datasets, especially its advantages in balancing generation efficiency and visual quality. For example, on the COCO-Stuff segmentation benchmark, our HGC significantly reduces the computational cost (MACs) by 63% (from 18.22T to 6.70T), while keeping the loss of semantic fidelity (quantized performance degradation) within 1.5%.
16.5CLMar 6
Confidence Before Answering: A Paradigm Shift for Efficient LLM Uncertainty EstimationChangcheng Li, Jiancan Wu, Hengheng Zhang et al.
Reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires accurate uncertainty estimation. Existing methods are predominantly answer-first, producing confidence only after generating an answer, which measure the correctness of a specific response and limits practical usability. We study a confidence-first paradigm, where the model outputs its confidence before answering, interpreting this score as the model's probability of answering the question correctly under its current policy. We propose CoCA(Co-optimized Confidence and Answers), a GRPO reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes confidence calibration and answer accuracy via segmented credit assignment. By assigning separate rewards and group-relative advantages to confidence and answer segments, CoCA enables stable joint optimization and avoids reward hacking. Experiments across math, code, and factual QA benchmarks show improved calibration and uncertainty discrimination while preserving answer quality, thereby enabling a broader range of downstream applications.