CVOct 8, 2025

OBS-Diff: Accurate Pruning For Diffusion Models in One-Shot

arXiv:2510.06751v116 citationsh-index: 2
AI Analysis

This addresses the problem of prohibitive computational costs for users of diffusion models, offering an incremental improvement in pruning efficiency.

The paper tackles the high computational cost of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models by proposing OBS-Diff, a one-shot pruning framework that achieves state-of-the-art compression with minimal visual quality degradation, enabling inference acceleration.

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, while powerful, suffer from prohibitive computational cost. Existing one-shot network pruning methods can hardly be directly applied to them due to the iterative denoising nature of diffusion models. To bridge the gap, this paper presents OBS-Diff, a novel one-shot pruning framework that enables accurate and training-free compression of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. Specifically, (i) OBS-Diff revitalizes the classic Optimal Brain Surgeon (OBS), adapting it to the complex architectures of modern diffusion models and supporting diverse pruning granularity, including unstructured, N:M semi-structured, and structured (MHA heads and FFN neurons) sparsity; (ii) To align the pruning criteria with the iterative dynamics of the diffusion process, by examining the problem from an error-accumulation perspective, we propose a novel timestep-aware Hessian construction that incorporates a logarithmic-decrease weighting scheme, assigning greater importance to earlier timesteps to mitigate potential error accumulation; (iii) Furthermore, a computationally efficient group-wise sequential pruning strategy is proposed to amortize the expensive calibration process. Extensive experiments show that OBS-Diff achieves state-of-the-art one-shot pruning for diffusion models, delivering inference acceleration with minimal degradation in visual quality.

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