# SDXL-Lightning: Progressive Adversarial Diffusion Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13929 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13929/

## Key facts

- Cited by 266 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 62 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 266)

- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [Fast High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12015/) (2024)
- [Delta-DiT: A Training-Free Acceleration Method Tailored for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01125/) (2024)
- [WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14614/) (2025)
- [Difix3D+: Improving 3D Reconstructions with Single-Step Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01774/) (2025)
- [Hyper-SD: Trajectory Segmented Consistency Model for Efficient Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13686/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training for One-Step Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08316/) (2025)
- [CFG++: Manifold-constrained Classifier Free Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08070/) (2024)
- [PuLID: Pure and Lightning ID Customization via Contrastive Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16022/) (2024)
- [Consistency Models Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14548/) (2024)
- [Learning-to-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Transformer via Layer Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01733/) (2024)
- [Eliminating Oversaturation and Artifacts of High Guidance Scales in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02416/) (2024)
- [MV-Adapter: Multi-view Consistent Image Generation Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03632/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09350/) (2025)
- [Large Scale Diffusion Distillation via Score-Regularized Continuous-Time Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08431/) (2025)
- [Phased Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18407/) (2024)
- [GenAI Arena: An Open Evaluation Platform for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04485/) (2024)
- [Distilling Diffusion Models into Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05967/) (2024)
- [Not All Noises Are Created Equally:Diffusion Noise Selection and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14041/) (2024)
- [One-Step Diffusion Distillation through Score Implicit Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16794/) (2024)
- [Controlling Language and Diffusion Models by Transporting Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23054/) (2024)
- [AddSR: Accelerating Diffusion-based Blind Super-Resolution with Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01717/) (2024)
- [Helios: Real Real-Time Long Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04379/) (2026)
- [TurboEdit: Text-Based Image Editing Using Few-Step Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00735/) (2024)
- [EM Distillation for One-step Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16852/) (2024)
- [Rectified Diffusion: Straightness Is Not Your Need in Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07303/) (2024)
- [Flash Diffusion: Accelerating Any Conditional Diffusion Model for Few Steps Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02347/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Compression for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13383/) (2024)
- [SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05301/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a diffusion distillation method that achieves new state-of-the-art in one-step/few-step 1024px text-to-image generation based on SDXL. Our method combines progressive and adversarial distillation to achieve a balance between quality and mode coverage. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical analysis, discriminator design, model formulation, and training techniques. We open-source our distilled SDXL-Lightning models both as LoRA and full UNet weights.