SADA: Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration

Ting Jiang, Yixiao Wang, Hancheng Ye, Zishan Shao, Jingwei Sun, Jingyang Zhang, Zekai Chen, Jianyi Zhang, Yiran Chen, Hai Li
Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 267:27649-27669, 2025.

Abstract

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative tasks but suffer from high computational costs due to their iterative sampling process and quadratic-attention costs. Existing training-free acceleration strategies that reduce per-step computation cost, while effectively reducing sampling time, demonstrate low faithfulness compared to the original baseline. We hypothesize that this fidelity gap arises because (a) different prompts correspond to varying denoising trajectory, and (b) such methods do not consider the underlying ODE formulation and its numerical solution. In this paper, we propose Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration (SADA), a novel paradigm that unifies step-wise and token-wise sparsity decisions via a single stability criterion to accelerate sampling of ODE-based generative models (Diffusion and Flow-matching). For (a), SADA adaptively allocates sparsity based on the sampling trajectory. For (b), SADA introduces principled approximation schemes that leverage the precise gradient information from the numerical ODE solver. Comprehensive evaluations on SD-2, SDXL, and Flux using both EDM and DPM++ solvers reveal consistent $\ge 1.8\times$ speedups with minimal fidelity degradation (LPIPS $\leq 0.10$ and FID $\leq 4.5$) compared to unmodified baselines, significantly outperforming prior methods. Moreover, SADA adapts seamlessly to other pipelines and modalities: It accelerates ControlNet without any modifications and speeds up MusicLDM by $1.8\times$ with $\sim 0.01$ spectrogram LPIPS. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ting-Justin-Jiang/sada-icml.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v267-jiang25h, title = {{SADA}: Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration}, author = {Jiang, Ting and Wang, Yixiao and Ye, Hancheng and Shao, Zishan and Sun, Jingwei and Zhang, Jingyang and Chen, Zekai and Zhang, Jianyi and Chen, Yiran and Li, Hai}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {27649--27669}, year = {2025}, editor = {Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry}, volume = {267}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {13--19 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v267/main/assets/jiang25h/jiang25h.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/jiang25h.html}, abstract = {Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative tasks but suffer from high computational costs due to their iterative sampling process and quadratic-attention costs. Existing training-free acceleration strategies that reduce per-step computation cost, while effectively reducing sampling time, demonstrate low faithfulness compared to the original baseline. We hypothesize that this fidelity gap arises because (a) different prompts correspond to varying denoising trajectory, and (b) such methods do not consider the underlying ODE formulation and its numerical solution. In this paper, we propose Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration (SADA), a novel paradigm that unifies step-wise and token-wise sparsity decisions via a single stability criterion to accelerate sampling of ODE-based generative models (Diffusion and Flow-matching). For (a), SADA adaptively allocates sparsity based on the sampling trajectory. For (b), SADA introduces principled approximation schemes that leverage the precise gradient information from the numerical ODE solver. Comprehensive evaluations on SD-2, SDXL, and Flux using both EDM and DPM++ solvers reveal consistent $\ge 1.8\times$ speedups with minimal fidelity degradation (LPIPS $\leq 0.10$ and FID $\leq 4.5$) compared to unmodified baselines, significantly outperforming prior methods. Moreover, SADA adapts seamlessly to other pipelines and modalities: It accelerates ControlNet without any modifications and speeds up MusicLDM by $1.8\times$ with $\sim 0.01$ spectrogram LPIPS. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ting-Justin-Jiang/sada-icml.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T SADA: Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration %A Ting Jiang %A Yixiao Wang %A Hancheng Ye %A Zishan Shao %A Jingwei Sun %A Jingyang Zhang %A Zekai Chen %A Jianyi Zhang %A Yiran Chen %A Hai Li %B Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2025 %E Aarti Singh %E Maryam Fazel %E Daniel Hsu %E Simon Lacoste-Julien %E Felix Berkenkamp %E Tegan Maharaj %E Kiri Wagstaff %E Jerry Zhu %F pmlr-v267-jiang25h %I PMLR %P 27649--27669 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/jiang25h.html %V 267 %X Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative tasks but suffer from high computational costs due to their iterative sampling process and quadratic-attention costs. Existing training-free acceleration strategies that reduce per-step computation cost, while effectively reducing sampling time, demonstrate low faithfulness compared to the original baseline. We hypothesize that this fidelity gap arises because (a) different prompts correspond to varying denoising trajectory, and (b) such methods do not consider the underlying ODE formulation and its numerical solution. In this paper, we propose Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration (SADA), a novel paradigm that unifies step-wise and token-wise sparsity decisions via a single stability criterion to accelerate sampling of ODE-based generative models (Diffusion and Flow-matching). For (a), SADA adaptively allocates sparsity based on the sampling trajectory. For (b), SADA introduces principled approximation schemes that leverage the precise gradient information from the numerical ODE solver. Comprehensive evaluations on SD-2, SDXL, and Flux using both EDM and DPM++ solvers reveal consistent $\ge 1.8\times$ speedups with minimal fidelity degradation (LPIPS $\leq 0.10$ and FID $\leq 4.5$) compared to unmodified baselines, significantly outperforming prior methods. Moreover, SADA adapts seamlessly to other pipelines and modalities: It accelerates ControlNet without any modifications and speeds up MusicLDM by $1.8\times$ with $\sim 0.01$ spectrogram LPIPS. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ting-Justin-Jiang/sada-icml.
APA
Jiang, T., Wang, Y., Ye, H., Shao, Z., Sun, J., Zhang, J., Chen, Z., Zhang, J., Chen, Y. & Li, H.. (2025). SADA: Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 267:27649-27669 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/jiang25h.html.

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