# LinFusion: 1 GPU, 1 Minute, 16K Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02097 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02097/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 65 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (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)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Compression Autoencoder for Efficient High-Resolution Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10733/) (2024)
- [SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Components for 4-Bit Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05007/) (2024)
- [Video World Models with Long-term Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05284/) (2025)
- [SANA-Video: Efficient Video Generation with Block Linear Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24695/) (2025)
- [Radial Attention: O(nlog n) Sparse Attention with Energy Decay for Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19852/) (2025)
- [Long-Context State-Space Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20171/) (2025)
- [FreeScale: Unleashing the Resolution of Diffusion Models via Tuning-Free Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09626/) (2024)
- [CLEAR: Conv-Like Linearization Revs Pre-Trained Diffusion Transformers Up](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16112/) (2024)
- [SnapGen: Taming High-Resolution Text-to-Image Models for Mobile Devices with Efficient Architectures and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09619/) (2024)
- [HiFlow: Training-free High-Resolution Image Generation with Flow-Aligned Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06232/) (2025)
- [EfficientViM: Efficient Vision Mamba with Hidden State Mixer based State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15241/) (2024)
- [PISA: Piecewise Sparse Attention Is Wiser for Efficient Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01077/) (2026)
- [DyPE: Dynamic Position Extrapolation for Ultra High Resolution Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20766/) (2025)
- [Ultra-Resolution Adaptation with Ease](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16322/) (2025)
- [Turbo2K: Towards Ultra-Efficient and High-Quality 2K Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14470/) (2025)
- [Exploring Diffusion Transformer Designs via Grafting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05340/) (2025)
- [UltraImage: Rethinking Resolution Extrapolation in Image Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04504/) (2025)
- [SD3.5-Flash: Distribution-Guided Distillation of Generative Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21318/) (2025)
- [LiT: Delving into a Simple Linear Diffusion Transformer for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12976/) (2025)
- [Text-to-Image Synthesis: A Decade Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16164/) (2024)
- [EDiT: Efficient Diffusion Transformers with Linear Compressed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16726/) (2025)
- [DC-Gen: Post-Training Diffusion Acceleration with Deeply Compressed Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25180/) (2025)
- [HiStream: Efficient High-Resolution Video Generation via Redundancy-Eliminated Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21338/) (2025)
- [DiCo: Revitalizing ConvNets for Scalable and Efficient Diffusion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11196/) (2025)
- [ScaleDiff: Higher-Resolution Image Synthesis via Efficient and Model-Agnostic Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25818/) (2025)
- [ZipIR: Latent Pyramid Diffusion Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08591/) (2025)
- [Parallel Sequence Modeling via Generalized Spatial Propagation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12381/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Transformer-to-Mamba Distillation for High-Resolution Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18999/) (2025)
- [Consistent and Controllable Image Animation with Motion Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07246/) (2025)
- [UltraImageGen: Efficient Ultra-High-Resolution Image Generation with Hierarchical Local Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16325/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern diffusion models, particularly those utilizing a Transformer-based UNet for denoising, rely heavily on self-attention operations to manage complex spatial relationships, thus achieving impressive generation performance. However, this existing paradigm faces significant challenges in generating high-resolution visual content due to its quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to the number of spatial tokens. To address this limitation, we aim at a novel linear attention mechanism as an alternative in this paper. Specifically, we begin our exploration from recently introduced models with linear complexity, e.g., Mamba2, RWKV6, Gated Linear Attention, etc, and identify two key features--attention normalization and non-causal inference--that enhance high-resolution visual generation performance. Building on these insights, we introduce a generalized linear attention paradigm, which serves as a low-rank approximation of a wide spectrum of popular linear token mixers. To save the training cost and better leverage pre-trained models, we initialize our models and distill the knowledge from pre-trained StableDiffusion (SD). We find that the distilled model, termed LinFusion, achieves performance on par with or superior to the original SD after only modest training, while significantly reducing time and memory complexity. Extensive experiments on SD-v1.5, SD-v2.1, and SD-XL demonstrate that LinFusion enables satisfactory and efficient zero-shot cross-resolution generation, accommodating ultra-resolution images like 16K on a single GPU. Moreover, it is highly compatible with pre-trained SD components and pipelines, such as ControlNet, IP-Adapter, DemoFusion, DistriFusion, etc, requiring no adaptation efforts. Codes are available at https://github.com/Huage001/LinFusion.