# Simple and Fast Distillation of Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.19681 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19681/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 53 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [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)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (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)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [Pseudo Numerical Methods for Diffusion Models on Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09778/) (2022)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Distilling Parallel Gradients for Fast ODE Solvers of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14797/) (2025)
- [RayFlow: Instance-Aware Diffusion Acceleration via Adaptive Flow Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07699/) (2025)
- [ERTACache: Error Rectification and Timesteps Adjustment for Efficient Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21091/) (2025)
- [BWCache: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers through Block-Wise Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13789/) (2025)
- [Data-Efficient Autoregressive-to-Diffusion Language Models via On-Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06712/) (2026)
- [S4S: Solving for a Diffusion Model Solver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17423/) (2025)
- [One-Step Offline Distillation of Diffusion-based Models via Koopman Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13358/) (2025)
- [Learnable Sampler Distillation for Discrete Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19962/) (2025)
- [Stream-DiffVSR: Low-Latency Streamable Video Super-Resolution via Auto-Regressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23709/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Diffusion Models: From Generative Pre-training to One-Step Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09376/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Stochastic Coefficients for Accelerating Diffusion Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23285/) (2025)
- [Geometric Regularity in Deterministic Sampling Dynamics of Diffusion-based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10177/) (2025)
- [On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17245/) (2025)
- [Parallel Diffusion Solver via Residual Dirichlet Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22796/) (2025)
- [DICE: Distilling Classifier-Free Guidance into Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03726/) (2025)
- [Gated Condition Injection without Multimodal Attention: Towards Controllable Linear-Attention Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27666/) (2026)
- [Optimize Your Sampling: Tuned Diffusion Sampling with Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18040/) (2026)
- [VeCoR -- Velocity Contrastive Regularization for Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18942/) (2025)
- [Analyzing and Improving Fast Sampling of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00763/) (2026)
- [TempoSyncDiff: Distilled Temporally-Consistent Diffusion for Low-Latency Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06057/) (2026)
- [Three Creates All: You Only Sample 3 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22375/) (2026)
- [Training Video Foundation Models with NVIDIA NeMo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12964/) (2025)
- [High Quality Diffusion Distillation on a Single GPU with Relative and Absolute Position Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20744/) (2025)
- [ImageRAGTurbo: Towards One-step Text-to-Image Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12640/) (2026)
- [B-DENSE: Branching For Dense Ensemble Network Supervision Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15971/) (2026)
- [Accelerating Masked Image Generation by Learning Controlled Latent Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23996/) (2026)
- [Beyond Fixed Inference: Quantitative Flow Matching for Adaptive Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02392/) (2026)
- [Jeffreys Flow: Robust Boltzmann Generators for Rare Event Sampling via Parallel Tempering Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05303/) (2026)
- [TIGER: Taming Identity, Geometry, and Generative Priors for High-Quality Face Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24336/) (2026)
- [Spectral Amplitude Purification in Distribution Matching for Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29116/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated their powerful performance across various tasks, but this comes at a cost of the slow sampling speed. To achieve both efficient and high-quality synthesis, various distillation-based accelerated sampling methods have been developed recently. However, they generally require time-consuming fine tuning with elaborate designs to achieve satisfactory performance in a specific number of function evaluation (NFE), making them difficult to employ in practice. To address this issue, we propose Simple and Fast Distillation (SFD) of diffusion models, which simplifies the paradigm used in existing methods and largely shortens their fine-tuning time up to 1000×. We begin with a vanilla distillation-based sampling method and boost its performance to state of the art by identifying and addressing several small yet vital factors affecting the synthesis efficiency and quality. Our method can also achieve sampling with variable NFEs using a single distilled model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFD strikes a good balance between the sample quality and fine-tuning costs in few-step image generation task. For example, SFD achieves 4.53 FID (NFE=2) on CIFAR-10 with only 0.64 hours of fine-tuning on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/diff-sampler.