Paper · arXiv 2411.10510
SmoothCache: A Universal Inference Acceleration Technique for Diffusion Transformers
Joseph Liu, Joshua Geddes, Ziyu Guo, Haomiao Jiang, Mahesh Kumar Nandwana
SmoothCache accelerates DiT inference by caching key features, achieving significant speed-ups while maintaining quality across image, video, and audio tasks.
Abstract
Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have emerged as powerful generative models for various tasks, including image, video, and speech synthesis. However, their inference process remains computationally expensive due to the repeated evaluation of resource-intensive attention and feed-forward modules. To address this, we introduce SmoothCache, a model-agnostic inference acceleration technique for DiT architectures. SmoothCache leverages the observed high similarity between layer outputs across adjacent diffusion timesteps. By analyzing layer-wise representation errors from a small calibration set, SmoothCache adaptively caches and reuses key features during inference. Our experiments demonstrate that SmoothCache achieves 8% to 71% speed up while maintaining or even improving generation quality across diverse modalities. We showcase its effectiveness on DiT-XL for image generation, Open-Sora for text-to-video, and Stable Audio Open for text-to-audio, highlighting its potential to enable real-time applications and broaden the accessibility of powerful DiT models.