FreeU: Free Lunch in Diffusion U-Net

Chenyang Si, Ziqi Huang, Yuming Jiang, Ziwei Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 4733-4743

In this paper we uncover the untapped potential of diffusion U-Net which serves as a "free lunch" that substantially improves the generation quality on the fly. We initially investigate the key contributions of the U-Net architecture to the denoising process and identify that its main backbone primarily contributes to denoising whereas its skip connections mainly introduce high-frequency features into the decoder module causing the potential neglect of crucial functions intrinsic to the backbone network. Capitalizing on this discovery we propose a simple yet effective method termed "FreeU" which enhances generation quality without additional training or finetuning. Our key insight is to strategically re-weight the contributions sourced from the U-Net's skip connections and backbone feature maps to leverage the strengths of both components of the U-Net architecture. Promising results on image and video generation tasks demonstrate that our FreeU can be readily integrated to existing diffusion models e.g. Stable Diffusion DreamBooth and ControlNet to improve the generation quality with only a few lines of code. All you need is to adjust two scaling factors during inference.