# DiTFastAttnV2: Head-wise Attention Compression for Multi-Modality Diffusion Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22796 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22796/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 51 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03665/) (2016)
- [MInference 1.0: Accelerating Pre-filling for Long-Context LLMs via Dynamic Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02490/) (2024)
- [SV3D: Novel Multi-view Synthesis and 3D Generation from a Single Image using Latent Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12008/) (2024)
- [DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00858/) (2023)
- [PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04692/) (2024)
- [DuoAttention: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference with Retrieval and Streaming Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10819/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Sparse-vDiT: Unleashing the Power of Sparse Attention to Accelerate Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03065/) (2025)
- [Astraea: A Token-wise Acceleration Framework for Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05096/) (2025)
- [SADA: Stability-guided Adaptive Diffusion Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17135/) (2025)
- [BWCache: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers through Block-Wise Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13789/) (2025)
- [Re-ttention: Ultra Sparse Visual Generation via Attention Statistical Reshape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22918/) (2025)
- [SVG-EAR: Parameter-Free Linear Compensation for Sparse Video Generation via Error-aware Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08982/) (2026)
- [SALAD: Achieve High-Sparsity Attention via Efficient Linear Attention Tuning for Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16515/) (2026)
- [RegionE: Adaptive Region-Aware Generation for Efficient Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25590/) (2025)
- [ZEUS: Accelerating Diffusion Models with Only Second-Order Predictor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01552/) (2026)
- [Denoise to Track: Harnessing Video Diffusion Priors for Robust Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04619/) (2025)
- [UltraImageGen: Efficient Ultra-High-Resolution Image Generation with Hierarchical Local Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16325/) (2025)
- [FlashOmni: A Unified Sparse Attention Engine for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25401/) (2025)
- [DiTReducio: A Training-Free Acceleration for DiT-Based TTS via Progressive Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09748/) (2025)
- [NanoFLUX: Distillation-Driven Compression of Large Text-to-Image Generation Models for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06879/) (2026)
- [6Bit-Diffusion: Inference-Time Mixed-Precision Quantization for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18742/) (2026)
- [HierEdit: Region-Aware Hierarchical Diffusion for Efficient High-Resolution Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17294/) (2026)
- [RT-Lynx: Putting GEMM Sparsity in the Right Place for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26632/) (2026)
- [SPADE: An Input-Adaptive Sparse Attention Engine for Fast Video Diffusion Models Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03335/) (2026)
- [HRDiT: Training-Free High-Resolution Image Generation with Off-the-Shelf Diffusion Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07003/) (2026)
- [Competition Domains Matter: Selective Head Globalization for Training-Free Sparse Attention in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14672/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image generation models, especially Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MMDiT), have shown remarkable progress in generating high-quality images. However, these models often face significant computational bottlenecks, particularly in attention mechanisms, which hinder their scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce DiTFastAttnV2, a post-training compression method designed to accelerate attention in MMDiT. Through an in-depth analysis of MMDiT's attention patterns, we identify key differences from prior DiT-based methods and propose head-wise arrow attention and caching mechanisms to dynamically adjust attention heads, effectively bridging this gap. We also design an Efficient Fused Kernel for further acceleration. By leveraging local metric methods and optimization techniques, our approach significantly reduces the search time for optimal compression schemes to just minutes while maintaining generation quality. Furthermore, with the customized kernel, DiTFastAttnV2 achieves a 68% reduction in attention FLOPs and 1.5x end-to-end speedup on 2K image generation without compromising visual fidelity.