Stretching Each Dollar: Diffusion Training from Scratch on a Micro-Budget

Vikash Sehwag, Xianghao Kong, Jingtao Li, Michael Spranger, Lingjuan Lyu; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 28596-28608

As scaling laws in generative AI push performance, they simultaneously concentrate the development of these models among actors with large computational resources. With a focus on text-to-image (T2I) generative models, we aim to unlock this bottleneck by demonstrating very low-cost training of large-scale T2I diffusion transformer models. As the computational cost of transformers increases with the number of patches in each image, we propose randomly masking up to 75% of the image patches during training. We propose a deferred masking strategy that preprocesses all patches using a patch-mixer before masking, thus significantly reducing the performance degradation with masking, making it superior to model downscaling in reducing computational cost. We also incorporate the latest improvements in transformer architecture, such as the use of mixture-of-experts layers, to improve performance and further identify the critical benefit of using synthetic images in micro-budget training. Finally, using only 37M publicly available real and synthetic images, we train a 1.16 billion parameter sparse transformer with only 1,890 USD economical cost and achieve a 12.7 FID in zero-shot generation on the COCO dataset. Notably, our model achieves competitive performance across both automated and human-centric evaluations, as well as high-quality generations, while incurring 118xlower costs than Stable Diffusion models and 14xlower costs than the current state-of-the-art approach, which costs \28,400. We also further investigate the influence of synthetic images on performance and demonstrate that micro-budget training on only synthetic images is sufficient for achieving high-quality data generation. Our end-to-end training pipeline and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/SonyResearch/micro_diffusion.