DreamPropeller: Supercharge Text-to-3D Generation with Parallel Sampling

Linqi Zhou, Andy Shih, Chenlin Meng, Stefano Ermon; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 4610-4619

Recent methods such as Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and Variational Score Distillation (VSD) using 2D diffusion models for text-to-3D generation have demonstrated impressive generation quality. However the long generation time of such algorithms significantly degrades the user experience. To tackle this problem we propose DreamPropeller a drop-in acceleration algorithm that can be wrapped around any existing text-to-3D generation pipeline based on score distillation. Our framework generalizes Picard iterations a classical algorithm for parallel sampling an ODE path and can account for non-ODE paths such as momentum-based gradient updates and changes in dimensions during the optimization process as in many cases of 3D generation. We show that our algorithm trades parallel compute for wallclock time and empirically achieves up to 4.7x speedup with a negligible drop in generation quality for all tested frameworks.