mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Uni-Instruct: One-step Diffusion Model through Unified Diffusion Divergence Instruction

arXiv 2505.20755 ↗First posted 27 May 2025cs.LG cs.CVcited by 13

On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion foundations and sampling

Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we unify more than 10 existing one-step diffusion distillation approaches, such as Diff-Instruct, DMD, SIM, SiD, f-distill, etc, inside a theory-driven framework which we name the textbfUni-Instruct. Uni-Instruct is motivated by our proposed diffusion expansion theory of the f-divergence family. Then we introduce key theories that overcome the intractability issue of the original expanded f-divergence, resulting in an equivalent yet tractable loss that effectively trains one-step diffusion models by minimizing the expanded f-divergence family. The novel unification introduced by Uni-Instruct not only offers new theoretical contributions that help understand existing approaches from a high-level perspective but also leads to state-of-the-art one-step diffusion generation performances. On the CIFAR10 generation benchmark, Uni-Instruct achieves record-breaking Frechet Inception Distance (FID) values of textbf1.46 for unconditional generation and textbf1.38 for conditional generation. On the ImageNet-64× 64 generation benchmark, Uni-Instruct achieves a new SoTA one-step generation FID of textbf1.02, which outperforms its 79-step teacher diffusion with a significant improvement margin of 1.33 (1.02 vs 2.35). We also apply Uni-Instruct on broader tasks like text-to-3D generation. For text-to-3D generation, Uni-Instruct gives decent results, which slightly outperforms previous methods, such as SDS and VSD, in terms of both generation quality and diversity. Both the solid theoretical and empirical contributions of Uni-Instruct will potentially help future studies on one-step diffusion distillation and knowledge transferring of diffusion models.

Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 58 of its 74 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

Builds on

58 of 74 references.

Closest ancestors · 37

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Inductive Moment Matching10 Mar
  2. 2025One-step Diffusion Models with f-Divergence Distribution Matching21 Feb
  3. 2024One-Step Diffusion Distillation through Score Implicit Matching22 Oct
  4. 2024Adversarial Score identity Distillation: Rapidly Surpassing the Teacher in One Step19 Oct
  5. 2024Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Models14 Oct
  6. 2024Consistency Models Made Easy20 Jun
  7. 2024Multistep Distillation of Diffusion Models via Moment Matching6 Jun
  8. 2024EM Distillation for One-step Diffusion Models27 May
  9. 2024Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis23 May
  10. 2024Score identity Distillation: Exponentially Fast Distillation of Pretrained Diffusion Models for One-Step Generation5 Apr
  11. 2024SDXS: Real-Time One-Step Latent Diffusion Models with Image Conditions25 Mar
  12. 2024SCott: Accelerating Diffusion Models with Stochastic Consistency Distillation3 Mar
25 more
  1. 2023One-Step Diffusion Distillation via Deep Equilibrium Models12 Dec
  2. 2023One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation30 Nov
  3. 2023Improved Techniques for Training Consistency Models22 Oct
  4. 2023DPM-Solver-v3: Improved Diffusion ODE Solver with Empirical Model Statistics20 Oct
  5. 2023Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference6 Oct
  6. 2023Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusion1 Oct
  7. 2023BOOT: Data-free Distillation of Denoising Diffusion Models with Bootstrapping8 Jun
  8. 2023Diff-Instruct: A Universal Approach for Transferring Knowledge From Pre-trained Diffusion Models29 May
  9. 2023A Comprehensive Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Diffusion Models9 Apr
  10. 2023TRACT: Denoising Diffusion Models with Transitive Closure Time-Distillation7 Mar
  11. 2023Consistency Models2 Mar
  12. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers19 Dec
  13. 2022Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models via Operator Learning24 Nov
  14. 2022On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models6 Oct
  15. 2022All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Models25 Sep
  16. 2022Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models1 Jun
  17. 2021Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANs15 Dec
  18. 2021Variational Diffusion Models1 Jul
  19. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis11 May
  20. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models18 Feb
  21. 2021Maximum Likelihood Training of Score-Based Diffusion Models22 Jan
  22. 2021Knowledge Distillation in Iterative Generative Models for Improved Sampling Speed7 Jan
  23. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations26 Nov
  24. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models6 Oct
  25. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models19 Jun

Other references · 21

  1. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 37,240
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  3. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  4. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,912
  5. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  6. 2022DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusioncited by 3,025
  7. 2018Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesiscited by 2,626
  8. 2023ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillationcited by 1,219
  9. 2023Fantasia3D: Disentangling Geometry and Appearance for High-quality Text-to-3D Content Creationcited by 687
  10. 2022StyleGAN-XL: Scaling StyleGAN to Large Diverse Datasetscited by 492
  11. 2024From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Modelscited by 433
  12. 2023A Variational Perspective on Solving Inverse Problems with Diffusion Modelscited by 222
9 more
  1. 2022Diffusion-GAN: Training GANs with Diffusioncited by 205
  2. 2022Scalable Adaptive Computation for Iterative Generationcited by 195
  3. 20234D-fy: Text-to-4D Generation Using Hybrid Score Distillation Samplingcited by 185
  4. 2023UFOGen: You Forward Once Large Scale Text-to-Image Generation via Diffusion GANscited by 166
  5. 2023Delta Denoising Scorecited by 121
  6. 2023SwiftBrush: One-Step Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Variational Score Distillationcited by 110
  7. 2024Diff-Instruct++: Training One-step Text-to-image Generator Model to Align with Human Preferencescited by 31
  8. 2024Flow Generator Matchingcited by 26
  9. 2024Physics Informed Distillation for Diffusion Modelscited by 13

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  1. 2024SlimFlow: Training Smaller One-Step Diffusion Models with Rectified Flow
  2. 2025VarDiU: A Variational Diffusive Upper Bound for One-Step Diffusion Distillation
  3. 2025Understanding Generalization in Diffusion Distillation via Probability Flow Distance
  4. 2026Consistent Distribution Matching for Data-Free Diffusion Distillation
  5. 2025On the Design of One-step Diffusion via Shortcutting Flow Paths
  6. 2025Diffusion As Self-Distillation: End-to-End Latent Diffusion In One Model
  7. 2026A Tutorial on Diffusion Theory: From Differential Equations to Diffusion Models
  8. 2025From Structure to Detail: Hierarchical Distillation for Efficient Diffusion Model