# Diffusion-RWKV: Scaling RWKV-Like Architectures for Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 73 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (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)
- [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)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11081/) (2024)
- [DDT: Decoupled Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05741/) (2025)
- [Align Your Flow: Scaling Continuous-Time Flow Map Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14603/) (2025)
- [SkyReels-A2: Compose Anything in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02436/) (2025)
- [Scaling Diffusion Transformers to 16 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11633/) (2024)
- [State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09516/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Score identity Distillation: Rapidly Surpassing the Teacher in One Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14919/) (2024)
- [LinFusion: 1 GPU, 1 Minute, 16K Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02097/) (2024)
- [Efficient Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey from Principles to Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11795/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05902/) (2024)
- [Restore-RWKV: Efficient and Effective Medical Image Restoration with RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11087/) (2024)
- [Dimba: Transformer-Mamba Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01159/) (2024)
- [RWKV-CLIP: A Robust Vision-Language Representation Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06973/) (2024)
- [Linear Attention Modeling for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05741/) (2025)
- [TREAD: Token Routing for Efficient Architecture-agnostic Diffusion Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04765/) (2025)
- [FLUX that Plays Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00587/) (2024)
- [Attention Surgery: An Efficient Recipe to Linearize Your Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24899/) (2025)
- [SkyReels-Audio: Omni Audio-Conditioned Talking Portraits in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00830/) (2025)
- [Ingredients: Blending Custom Photos with Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01790/) (2025)
- [Video Diffusion Transformers are In-Context Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10783/) (2024)
- [LiT: Delving into a Simple Linear Diffusion Transformer for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12976/) (2025)
- [You Only Scan Once: Efficient Multi-dimension Sequential Modeling with LightNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21022/) (2024)
- [OccRWKV: Rethinking Efficient 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19987/) (2024)
- [Music Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13358/) (2024)
- [ReHyAt: Recurrent Hybrid Attention for Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04342/) (2026)
- [A Survey of RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14847/) (2024)
- [Overflow Prevention Enhances Long-Context Recurrent LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07793/) (2025)
- [ZipIR: Latent Pyramid Diffusion Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08591/) (2025)
- [C3-OWD: A Curriculum Cross-modal Contrastive Learning Framework for Open-World Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23316/) (2025)
- [Exploring Real&Synthetic Dataset and Linear Attention in Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03814/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformers have catalyzed advancements in computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) fields. However, substantial computational complexity poses limitations for their application in long-context tasks, such as high-resolution image generation. This paper introduces a series of architectures adapted from the RWKV model used in the NLP, with requisite modifications tailored for diffusion model applied to image generation tasks, referred to as Diffusion-RWKV. Similar to the diffusion with Transformers, our model is designed to efficiently handle patchnified inputs in a sequence with extra conditions, while also scaling up effectively, accommodating both large-scale parameters and extensive datasets. Its distinctive advantage manifests in its reduced spatial aggregation complexity, rendering it exceptionally adept at processing high-resolution images, thereby eliminating the necessity for windowing or group cached operations. Experimental results on both condition and unconditional image generation tasks demonstrate that Diffison-RWKV achieves performance on par with or surpasses existing CNN or Transformer-based diffusion models in FID and IS metrics while significantly reducing total computation FLOP usage.