SCEdit: Efficient and Controllable Image Diffusion Generation via Skip Connection Editing

Zeyinzi Jiang, Chaojie Mao, Yulin Pan, Zhen Han, Jingfeng Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 8995-9004

Image diffusion models have been utilized in various tasks such as text-to-image generation and controllable image synthesis. Recent research has introduced tuning methods that make subtle adjustments to the original models yielding promising results in specific adaptations of foundational generative diffusion models. Rather than modifying the main backbone of the diffusion model we delve into the role of skip connection in U-Net and reveal that hierarchical features aggregating long-distance information across encoder and decoder make a significant impact on the content and quality of image generation. Based on the observation we propose an efficient generative tuning framework dubbed SCEdit which integrates and edits Skip Connection using a lightweight tuning module named SC-Tuner. Furthermore the proposed framework allows for straightforward extension to controllable image synthesis by injecting different conditions with Controllable SC-Tuner simplifying and unifying the network design for multi-condition inputs. Our SCEdit substantially reduces training parameters memory usage and computational expense due to its lightweight tuners with backward propagation only passing to the decoder blocks. Extensive experiments conducted on text-to-image generation and controllable image synthesis tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of efficiency and performance. Project page: https://scedit.github.io/.