Papers › Make a Cheap Scaling: A Self-Cascade Diffusion Model for Higher-Resolution Adaptation

Make a Cheap Scaling: A Self-Cascade Diffusion Model for Higher-Resolution Adaptation

16 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.10491archive 2025-07-28

Lanqing Guo, Yingqing He, Haoxin Chen, Menghan Xia, Xiaodong Cun, YuFei Wang, Siyu Huang, Yong Zhang, Xintao Wang, Qifeng Chen, Ying Shan, Bihan Wen

Diffusion models have proven to be highly effective in image and video generation; however, they still face composition challenges when generating images of varying sizes due to single-scale training data. Adapting large pre-trained diffusion models for higher resolution demands substantial computational and optimization resources, yet achieving a generation capability comparable to low-resolution models remains elusive. This paper proposes a novel self-cascade diffusion model that leverages the rich knowledge gained from a well-trained low-resolution model for rapid adaptation to higher-resolution image and video generation, employing either tuning-free or cheap upsampler tuning paradigms. Integrating a sequence of multi-scale upsampler modules, the self-cascade diffusion model can efficiently adapt to a higher resolution, preserving the original composition and generation capabilities. We further propose a pivot-guided noise re-schedule strategy to speed up the inference process and improve local structural details. Compared to full fine-tuning, our approach achieves a 5X training speed-up and requires only an additional 0.002M tuning parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can quickly adapt to higher resolution image and video synthesis by fine-tuning for just 10k steps, with virtually no additional inference time.

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