Cache Me if You Can: Accelerating Diffusion Models through Block Caching

Felix Wimbauer, Bichen Wu, Edgar Schoenfeld, Xiaoliang Dai, Ji Hou, Zijian He, Artsiom Sanakoyeu, Peizhao Zhang, Sam Tsai, Jonas Kohler, Christian Rupprecht, Daniel Cremers, Peter Vajda, Jialiang Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 6211-6220

Diffusion models have recently revolutionized the field of image synthesis due to their ability to generate photorealistic images. However one of the major drawbacks of diffusion models is that the image generation process is costly. A large image-to-image network has to be applied many times to iteratively refine an image from random noise. While many recent works propose techniques to reduce the number of required steps they generally treat the underlying denoising network as a black box. In this work we investigate the behavior of the layers within the network and find that 1) the layers' output changes smoothly over time 2) the layers show distinct patterns of change and 3) the change from step to step is often very small. We hypothesize that many layer computations in the denoising network are redundant. Leveraging this we introduce Block Caching in which we reuse outputs from layer blocks of previous steps to speed up inference. Furthermore we propose a technique to automatically determine caching schedules based on each block's changes over timesteps. In our experiments we show through FID human evaluation and qualitative analysis that Block Caching allows to generate images with higher visual quality at the same computational cost. We demonstrate this for different state-of-the-art models (LDM and EMU) and solvers (DDIM and DPM).