# LowDiff: Efficient Diffusion Sampling with Low-Resolution Condition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15342 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15342/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 49 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (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)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00482/) (2023)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Score-based Generative Modeling in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05931/) (2021)
- [Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07804/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Training Dynamics of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02696/) (2023)
- [Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01423/) (2025)
- [Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05954/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Distillation in Iterative Generative Models for Improved Sampling Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02388/) (2021)
- [Q-Diffusion: Quantizing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04304/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation but their practical application is often hindered by the slow sampling speed. Prior efforts of improving efficiency primarily focus on compressing models or reducing the total number of denoising steps, largely neglecting the possibility to leverage multiple input resolutions in the generation process. In this work, we propose LowDiff, a novel and efficient diffusion framework based on a cascaded approach by generating increasingly higher resolution outputs. Besides, LowDiff employs a unified model to progressively refine images from low resolution to the desired resolution. With the proposed architecture design and generation techniques, we achieve comparable or even superior performance with much fewer high-resolution sampling steps. LowDiff is applicable to diffusion models in both pixel space and latent space. Extensive experiments on both conditional and unconditional generation tasks across CIFAR-10, FFHQ and ImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our method. Results show over 50% throughput improvement across all datasets and settings while maintaining comparable or better quality. On unconditional CIFAR-10, LowDiff achieves an FID of 2.11 and IS of 9.87, while on conditional CIFAR-10, an FID of 1.94 and IS of 10.03. On FFHQ 64x64, LowDiff achieves an FID of 2.43, and on ImageNet 256x256, LowDiff built on LightningDiT-B/1 produces high-quality samples with a FID of 4.00 and an IS of 195.06, together with substantial efficiency gains.