Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track
Zhengyang Geng, Ashwini Pokle, J. Zico Kolter
Diffusion models excel at producing high-quality samples but naively require hundreds of iterations, prompting multiple attempts to distill the generation process into a faster network. However, many existing approaches suffer from a variety of challenges: the process for distillation training can be complex, often requiring multiple training stages, and the resulting models perform poorly when utilized in single-step generative applications. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective means of distilling diffusion models *directly* from the initial noise to the resulting image. Of particular importance to our approach is to leverage a new Deep Equilibrium (DEQ) model as the distilled architecture: the Generative Equilibrium Transformer (GET). Our method enables fully offline training with just noise/image pairs from the diffusion model while achieving superior performance compared to existing one-step methods on comparable training budgets. We demonstrate that the DEQ architecture is crucial to this capability, as GET matches a $5\times$ larger ViT in terms of FID scores while striking a critical balance of computational cost and image quality. Code, checkpoints, and datasets are available [here](https://github.com/locuslab/get).