# Delta-DiT: A Training-Free Acceleration Method Tailored for Diffusion Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01125/

## Key facts

- Cited by 175 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 47 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14048/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models with Exponential Integrator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13902/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 175)

- [Timestep Embedding Tells: It's Time to Cache for Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19108/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Token-wise Feature Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05317/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Video Generation with Pyramid Attention Broadcast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12588/) (2024)
- [dKV-Cache: The Cache for Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15781/) (2025)
- [From Reusing to Forecasting: Accelerating Diffusion Models with TaylorSeers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06923/) (2025)
- [Fast Video Generation with Sliding Tile Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04507/) (2025)
- [FasterCache: Training-Free Video Diffusion Model Acceleration with High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19355/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Caching for Faster Video Generation with Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02397/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10875/) (2025)
- [OminiControl2: Efficient Conditioning for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08280/) (2025)
- [xDiT: an Inference Engine for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) with Massive Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01738/) (2024)
- [Less is Enough: Training-Free Video Diffusion Acceleration via Runtime-Adaptive Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02860/) (2025)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji-Faster: Towards Efficient, Fine-Controllable, and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16630/) (2025)
- [FlashVSR: Towards Real-Time Diffusion-Based Streaming Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12747/) (2025)
- [DiCache: Let Diffusion Model Determine Its Own Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17356/) (2025)
- [MagCache: Fast Video Generation with Magnitude-Aware Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09045/) (2025)
- [VMoBA: Mixture-of-Block Attention for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23858/) (2025)
- [Sparse-vDiT: Unleashing the Power of Sparse Attention to Accelerate Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03065/) (2025)
- [Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10389/) (2025)
- [U-REPA: Aligning Diffusion U-Nets to ViTs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18414/) (2025)
- [Token Caching for Diffusion Transformer Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18523/) (2024)
- [Token Pruning for Caching Better: 9 Times Acceleration on Stable Diffusion for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00375/) (2024)
- [StreamDiffusionV2: A Streaming System for Dynamic and Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07399/) (2025)
- [SpeCa: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Speculative Feature Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11628/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Token-wise Feature Caching: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Dual Feature Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18911/) (2024)
- [Flow caching for autoregressive video generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10825/) (2026)
- [Importance-Based Token Merging for Efficient Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16720/) (2024)
- [SmoothCache: A Universal Inference Acceleration Technique for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10510/) (2024)
- [DiTFastAttnV2: Head-wise Attention Compression for Multi-Modality Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22796/) (2025)
- [FreqCa: Accelerating Diffusion Models via Frequency-Aware Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08669/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models are widely recognized for generating high-quality and diverse images, but their poor real-time performance has led to numerous acceleration works, primarily focusing on UNet-based structures. With the more successful results achieved by diffusion transformers (DiT), there is still a lack of exploration regarding the impact of DiT structure on generation, as well as the absence of an acceleration framework tailored to the DiT architecture. To tackle these challenges, we conduct an investigation into the correlation between DiT blocks and image generation. Our findings reveal that the front blocks of DiT are associated with the outline of the generated images, while the rear blocks are linked to the details. Based on this insight, we propose an overall training-free inference acceleration framework Delta-DiT: using a designed cache mechanism to accelerate the rear DiT blocks in the early sampling stages and the front DiT blocks in the later stages. Specifically, a DiT-specific cache mechanism called Delta-Cache is proposed, which considers the inputs of the previous sampling image and reduces the bias in the inference. Extensive experiments on PIXART-α and DiT-XL demonstrate that the Delta-DiT can achieve a 1.6× speedup on the 20-step generation and even improves performance in most cases. In the scenario of 4-step consistent model generation and the more challenging 1.12× acceleration, our method significantly outperforms existing methods. Our code will be publicly available.