# Scale-wise Distillation of Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16397/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 85 of its 107 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [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)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [SD3.5-Flash: Distribution-Guided Distillation of Generative Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21318/) (2025)
- [STORK: Faster Diffusion And Flow Matching Sampling By Resolving Both Stiffness And Structure-Dependence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24210/) (2025)
- [PyramidalWan: On Making Pretrained Video Model Pyramidal for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04792/) (2026)
- [Continuous-Time Distribution Matching for Few-Step Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06376/) (2026)
- [Sortblock: Similarity-Aware Feature Reuse for Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00412/) (2025)
- [ReCache: Learning Budget-Aware Caching Schedules for Diffusion Models via REINFORCE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06060/) (2026)
- [Optimize Your Sampling: Tuned Diffusion Sampling with Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18040/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Global Text Conditioning in Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09268/) (2026)
- [On the Memorization of Consistency Distillation for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23552/) (2026)
- [CAB: Accelerating Flow and Diffusion Sampling via Rectification and Corrected Adams-Bashforth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16736/) (2026)
- [When does training on downscaled images yield the same gradients?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04448/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent diffusion distillation methods have achieved remarkable progress, enabling high-quality ~4-step sampling for large-scale text-conditional image and video diffusion models. However, further reducing the number of sampling steps becomes more and more challenging, suggesting that efficiency gains may be better mined along other model axes. Motivated by this perspective, we introduce SwD, a scale-wise diffusion distillation framework that equips few-step models with progressive generation, avoiding redundant computations at intermediate diffusion timesteps. Beyond efficiency, SwD enriches the family of distribution matching distillation approaches by introducing a simple patch-level distillation objective based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). This objective significantly improves the convergence of existing distillation methods and performs surprisingly well in isolation, offering a competitive baseline for diffusion distillation. Applied to state-of-the-art text-to-image/video diffusion models, SwD approaches the sampling speed of two full-resolution steps and largely outperforms alternatives under the same compute budget, as evidenced by automatic metrics and human preference studies. Project page: https://yandex-research.github.io/swd