# Fast Training of Diffusion Models with Masked Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09305 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09305/

## Key facts

- Cited by 176 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 48 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 176)

- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08740/) (2024)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01423/) (2025)
- [PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04692/) (2024)
- [Photorealistic Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06662/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11690/) (2025)
- [Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11081/) (2024)
- [REPA-E: Unlocking VAE for End-to-End Tuning with Latent Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10483/) (2025)
- [Learning-to-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Transformer via Layer Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01733/) (2024)
- [Scalable High-Resolution Pixel-Space Image Synthesis with Hourglass Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11605/) (2024)
- [ViDiT-Q: Efficient and Accurate Quantization of Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02540/) (2024)
- [Representation Entanglement for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Much Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01467/) (2025)
- [EQ-VAE: Equivariance Regularized Latent Space for Improved Generative Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09509/) (2025)
- [Latent Diffusion Model without Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15301/) (2025)
- [PixelDiT: Pixel Diffusion Transformers for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20645/) (2025)
- [GenTron: Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04557/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models Without Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18257/) (2023)
- [FasterDiT: Towards Faster Diffusion Transformers Training without Architecture Modification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10356/) (2024)
- [Human4DiT: 360-degree Human Video Generation with 4D Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17405/) (2024)
- [No Other Representation Component Is Needed: Diffusion Transformers Can Provide Representation Guidance by Themselves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02831/) (2025)
- [Sora as a World Model? A Complete Survey on Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05131/) (2024)
- [SD-DiT: Unleashing the Power of Self-supervised Discrimination in Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17004/) (2024)
- [DiP: Taming Diffusion Models in Pixel Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18822/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Score identity Distillation: Rapidly Surpassing the Teacher in One Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14919/) (2024)
- [Boosting Generative Image Modeling via Joint Image-Feature Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16064/) (2025)
- [Pyramid Diffusion for Fine 3D Large Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12085/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws For Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08184/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-RWKV: Scaling RWKV-Like Architectures for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04478/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose an efficient approach to train large diffusion models with masked transformers. While masked transformers have been extensively explored for representation learning, their application to generative learning is less explored in the vision domain. Our work is the first to exploit masked training to reduce the training cost of diffusion models significantly. Specifically, we randomly mask out a high proportion (e.g., 50%) of patches in diffused input images during training. For masked training, we introduce an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture consisting of a transformer encoder that operates only on unmasked patches and a lightweight transformer decoder on full patches. To promote a long-range understanding of full patches, we add an auxiliary task of reconstructing masked patches to the denoising score matching objective that learns the score of unmasked patches. Experiments on ImageNet-256x256 and ImageNet-512x512 show that our approach achieves competitive and even better generative performance than the state-of-the-art Diffusion Transformer (DiT) model, using only around 30% of its original training time. Thus, our method shows a promising way of efficiently training large transformer-based diffusion models without sacrificing the generative performance.