COMPUTER VISION

Imagine Flash: Accelerating Emu Diffusion Models with Backward Distillation

April 18, 2024

Abstract

Diffusion models are a powerful generative framework, but come with expensive inference. Existing acceleration methods often compromise image quality or fail under complex conditioning when operating in an extremely low-step regime. In this work, we propose a novel distillation framework tailored to enable high-fidelity, diverse sample generation using just one to three steps. Our approach comprises three key components: (i) Backward Distillation, which mitigates training-inference discrepancies by calibrating the student on its own backward trajectory; (ii) Shifted Reconstruction Loss that dynamically adapts knowledge transfer based on the current time step; and (iii) Noise Correction, an inference time technique that enhances sample quality by addressing singularities in noise prediction. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing competitors in quantitative metrics and human evaluations. Remarkably, it achieves performance comparable to the teacher model using only three denoising steps, enabling efficient high-quality generation.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Jonas Kohler

Albert Pumarola

Edgar Schoenfeld

Artsiom Sanakoyeu

Roshan Sumbaly

Peter Vajda

Ali Thabet

Publisher

Related Publications

June 27, 2025

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

CONVERSATIONAL AI

Seamless Interaction: Dyadic Audiovisual Motion Modeling and Large-Scale Dataset

Vasu Agrawal, Akinniyi Akinyemi, Kathryn Alvero, Morteza Behrooz, Julia Buffalini, Fabio Maria Carlucci, Joy Chen, Junming Chen, Zhang Chen, Shiyang Cheng, Praveen Chowdary, Joe Chuang, Antony D'Avirro, Jon Daly, Ning Dong, Mark Duppenthaler, Cynthia Gao, Jeff Girard, Martin Gleize, Sahir Gomez, Hongyu Gong, Srivathsan Govindarajan, Brandon Han, Sen He, Denise Hernandez, Yordan Hristov, Rongjie Huang, Hirofumi Inaguma, Somya Jain, Raj Janardhan, Qingyao Jia, Christopher Klaiber, Dejan Kovachev, Moneish Kumar, Hang Li, Yilei Li, Pavel Litvin, Wei Liu, Guangyao Ma, Jing Ma, Martin Ma, Xutai Ma, Lucas Mantovani, Sagar Miglani, Sreyas Mohan, Louis-Philippe Morency, Evonne Ng, Kam-Woh Ng, Tu Anh Nguyen, Amia Oberai, Benjamin Peloquin, Juan Pino, Jovan Popovic, Omid Poursaeed, Fabian Prada, Alice Rakotoarison, Alexander Richard, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Vasu Sharma, Alex Shcherbyna, Jie Shen, Anastasis Stathopoulos, Anna Sun, Paden Tomasello, Tuan Tran, Arina Turkatenko, Bo Wan, Chao Wang, Jeff Wang, Mary Williamson, Carleigh Wood, Tao Xiang, Yilin Yang, Zhiyuan Yao, Chen Zhang, Jiemin Zhang, Xinyue Zhang, Jason Zheng, Pavlo Zhyzheria, Jan Zikes, Michael Zollhoefer