Towards Stabilized and Efficient Diffusion Transformers through Long-Skip-Connections with Spectral Constraints
This work addresses efficiency and stability issues in diffusion transformers for generative AI applications, representing an incremental improvement by adapting U-Net components to DiT.
The paper tackled the problem of dynamic feature instability in Diffusion Transformers (DiT) for image and video generation, which causes error amplification during cached inference, and proposed Skip-DiT with Long-Skip-Connections to stabilize features, resulting in 4.4 times training acceleration and 1.5-2 times inference acceleration with negligible quality loss.
Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have emerged as a powerful architecture for image and video generation, offering superior quality and scalability. However, their practical application suffers from inherent dynamic feature instability, leading to error amplification during cached inference. Through systematic analysis, we identify the absence of long-range feature preservation mechanisms as the root cause of unstable feature propagation and perturbation sensitivity. To this end, we propose Skip-DiT, an image and video generative DiT variant enhanced with Long-Skip-Connections (LSCs) - the key efficiency component in U-Nets. Theoretical spectral norm and visualization analysis demonstrate how LSCs stabilize feature dynamics. Skip-DiT architecture and its stabilized dynamic feature enable an efficient statical caching mechanism that reuses deep features across timesteps while updating shallow components. Extensive experiments across the image and video generation tasks demonstrate that Skip-DiT achieves: (1) 4.4 times training acceleration and faster convergence, (2) 1.5-2 times inference acceleration with negligible quality loss and high fidelity to the original output, outperforming existing DiT caching methods across various quantitative metrics. Our findings establish Long-Skip-Connections as critical architectural components for stable and efficient diffusion transformers. Codes are provided in the https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Skip-DiT.