Noise Consistency Training: A Native Approach for One-Step Generator in Learning Additional Controls

TL;DR

Noise Consistency Training (NCT) is a lightweight, modular method that enables pre-trained one-step generators to incorporate new control signals efficiently without retraining or access to original training data.

Contribution

NCT introduces a novel noise consistency loss and adapter module, allowing direct control integration into existing generators, reducing computational costs and complexity.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art controllable generation in a single pass

Surpasses multi-step and distillation methods in quality and efficiency

Requires only pre-trained generator and control model, no retraining or original data

Abstract

The pursuit of efficient and controllable high-quality content generation remains a central challenge in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC). While one-step generators, enabled by diffusion distillation techniques, offer excellent generation quality and computational efficiency, adapting them to new control conditions--such as structural constraints, semantic guidelines, or external inputs--poses a significant challenge. Conventional approaches often necessitate computationally expensive modifications to the base model and subsequent diffusion distillation. This paper introduces Noise Consistency Training (NCT), a novel and lightweight approach to directly integrate new control signals into pre-trained one-step generators without requiring access to original training images or retraining the base diffusion model. NCT operates by introducing an adapter module and employs a noise consistency loss in the noise space of the generator. This loss aligns the adapted model's generation behavior across noises that are conditionally dependent to varying degrees, implicitly guiding it to adhere to the new control. Theoretically, this training objective can be understood as minimizing the distributional distance between the adapted generator and the conditional distribution induced by the new conditions. NCT is modular, data-efficient, and easily deployable, relying only on the pre-trained one-step generator and a control signal model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NCT achieves state-of-the-art controllable generation in a single forward pass, surpassing existing multi-step and distillation-based methods in both generation quality and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Luo-Yihong/NCT