Accelerating Diffusion Transformer via Error-Optimized Cache

TL;DR

This paper introduces Error-Optimized Cache (EOC) for Diffusion Transformers, significantly reducing caching errors and improving image generation quality without extra computational cost.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel error-optimized caching method that enhances diffusion transformer sampling efficiency by reducing caching-induced errors.

Findings

Significant FID improvements across various caching levels.

EOC reduces caching errors without increasing computational load.

Enhanced image quality demonstrated on ImageNet dataset.

Abstract

Diffusion Transformer (DiT) is a crucial method for content generation. However, it needs a lot of time to sample. Many studies have attempted to use caching to reduce the time consumption of sampling. Existing caching methods accelerate generation by reusing DiT features from the previous time step and skipping calculations in the next, but they tend to locate and cache low-error modules without focusing on reducing caching-induced errors, resulting in a sharp decline in generated content quality when increasing caching intensity. To solve this problem, we propose the \textbf{E}rror-\textbf{O}ptimized \textbf{C}ache (\textbf{EOC}). This method introduces three key improvements: \textbf{(1)} Prior knowledge extraction: Extract and process the caching differences; \textbf{(2)} A judgment method for cache optimization: Determine whether certain caching steps need to be optimized; \textbf{(3)} Cache optimization: reduce caching errors. Experiments show that this algorithm significantly reduces the error accumulation caused by caching, especially excessive caching. On the ImageNet dataset, without substantially increasing the computational load, this method improves the FID of the generated images when the rule-based model FORA has a caching level of \textbf{75}\%, \textbf{50}\%, and \textbf{25}\%, and the training-based model Learning-to-cache has a caching level of \textbf{22}\%. Specifically, the FID values change from 30.454 to 21.690 (\textbf{28.8}\%), from 6.857 to 5.821 (\textbf{15.1}\%), from 3.870 to 3.692 (\textbf{4.6}\%), and from 3.539 to 3.451 (\textbf{2.5}\%) respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/qiujx0520/EOC_MM2025.git.