mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

UltraImageGen: Efficient Ultra-High-Resolution Image Generation with Hierarchical Local Attention

arXiv 2510.16325 ↗First posted 18 Oct 2025cs.CVcited by 3

On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion foundations and sampling

Abstract (arXiv)

Ultra-high-resolution text-to-image generation is increasingly vital for applications requiring fine-grained textures and global structural fidelity, yet state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion models such as FLUX and SD3 remain confined to sub 2MP (< 1K×2K) resolutions due to the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms and the scarcity of high-quality high-resolution training data. We present UltraImageGen, a novel framework that introduces hierarchical local attention with low-resolution global guidance, enabling efficient, scalable, and semantically coherent image synthesis at ultra-high resolutions. Specifically, high-resolution latents are divided into hardware aligned fixed-size local windows to reduce attention complexity from quadratic to near-linear, while a low-resolution latent equipped with scaled positional embeddings injects global semantics as an anchor. A lightweight LoRA adaptation bridges global and local pathways during denoising, ensuring consistency across structure and detail. To maximize inference efficiency and achieve scalable ultra-high-resolution generation, we repermute token sequence in window-first order, so that the GPU-friendly dense local blocks in attention calculation equals to the fixed-size local window in 2D regardless of resolution. Together ourwork reliably scales the pretrained model to resolutions higher than 8K with more than 10× speed up and significantly lower memory usage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ourwork achieves superior quality while maintaining computational efficiency, establishing a practical paradigm for advancing ultra-high-resolution image generation.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 66 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2025.

Builds on

66 of 76 references.

Closest ancestors · 23

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025HiDream-I1: A High-Efficient Image Generative Foundation Model with Sparse Diffusion Transformer28 May
  2. 2025Diffusion-4K: Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models24 Mar
  3. 2025Ultra-Resolution Adaptation with Ease20 Mar
  4. 2025SANA 1.5: Efficient Scaling of Training-Time and Inference-Time Compute in Linear Diffusion Transformer30 Jan
  5. 2024FreeScale: Unleashing the Resolution of Diffusion Models via Tuning-Free Scale Fusion12 Dec
  6. 2024FreCaS: Efficient Higher-Resolution Image Generation via Frequency-aware Cascaded Sampling24 Oct
  7. 2024I-Max: Maximize the Resolution Potential of Pre-trained Rectified Flow Transformers with Projected Flow10 Oct
  8. 2024HiPrompt: Tuning-free Higher-Resolution Generation with Hierarchical MLLM Prompts4 Sep
  9. 2024MegaFusion: Extend Diffusion Models towards Higher-resolution Image Generation without Further Tuning20 Aug
  10. 2024DiffuseHigh: Training-free Progressive High-Resolution Image Synthesis through Structure Guidance26 Jun
  11. 2024ResMaster: Mastering High-Resolution Image Generation via Structural and Fine-Grained Guidance24 Jun
  12. 2024FouriScale: A Frequency Perspective on Training-Free High-Resolution Image Synthesis19 Mar
11 more
  1. 2024PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation7 Mar
  2. 2024Make a Cheap Scaling: A Self-Cascade Diffusion Model for Higher-Resolution Adaptation16 Feb
  3. 2024PIXART-δ: Fast and Controllable Image Generation with Latent Consistency Models10 Jan
  4. 2023HiDiffusion: Unlocking Higher-Resolution Creativity and Efficiency in Pretrained Diffusion Models29 Nov
  5. 2023PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis30 Sep
  6. 2023Relay Diffusion: Unifying diffusion process across resolutions for image synthesis4 Sep
  7. 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis4 Jul
  8. 2023DiffFit: Unlocking Transferability of Large Diffusion Models via Simple Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning13 Apr
  9. 2023Simple diffusion: End-to-end diffusion for high resolution images26 Jan
  10. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers19 Dec
  11. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models20 Dec

Other references · 43

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
  3. 2021Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windowscited by 12,139
  4. 2021RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embeddingcited by 4,703
  5. 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,152
  6. 2022FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awarenesscited by 3,673
  7. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,413
  8. 2016Improved Techniques for Training GANscited by 2,970
  9. 2023FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioningcited by 2,598
  10. 2021SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 1,937
  11. 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 1,006
  12. 2022Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Imagescited by 991
31 more
  1. 2023GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignmentcited by 972
  2. 2021CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformerscited by 694
  3. 2021Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolutioncited by 529
  4. 2024FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precisioncited by 519
  5. 2024Hunyuan-DiT: A Powerful Multi-Resolution Diffusion Transformer with Fine-Grained Chinese Understandingcited by 298
  6. 2024Playground v2.5: Three Insights towards Enhancing Aesthetic Quality in Text-to-Image Generationcited by 256
  7. 2025Sparse VideoGen: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers with Spatial-Temporal Sparsitycited by 217
  8. 2024SageAttention: Accurate 8-Bit Attention for Plug-and-play Inference Accelerationcited by 160
  9. 2025Seedream 3.0 Technical Reportcited by 154
  10. 2023RAPHAEL: Text-to-Image Generation via Large Mixture of Diffusion Pathscited by 142
  11. 2025XAttention: Block Sparse Attention with Antidiagonal Scoringcited by 137
  12. 2025Fast Video Generation with Sliding Tile Attentioncited by 128
  13. 2025FlexPrefill: A Context-Aware Sparse Attention Mechanism for Efficient Long-Sequence Inferencecited by 123
  14. 2024The Hedgehog & the Porcupine: Expressive Linear Attentions with Softmax Mimicrycited by 120
  15. 2024DiTFastAttn: Attention Compression for Diffusion Transformer Modelscited by 115
  16. 2024SageAttention2: Efficient Attention with Thorough Outlier Smoothing and Per-thread INT4 Quantizationcited by 114
  17. 2023DemoFusion: Democratising High-Resolution Image Generation With No cited by 107
  18. 2025Sparse VideoGen2: Accelerate Video Generation with Sparse Attention via Semantic-Aware Permutationcited by 106
  19. 2024UltraPixel: Advancing Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis to New Peakscited by 65
  20. 2024DiG: Scalable and Efficient Diffusion Models with Gated Linear Attentioncited by 56
  21. 2024Bridging the Divide: Reconsidering Softmax and Linear Attentioncited by 48
  22. 2024LinFusion: 1 GPU, 1 Minute, 16K Imagecited by 43
  23. 2023Any-Size-Diffusion: Toward Efficient Text-Driven Synthesis for Any-Size HD Imagescited by 36
  24. 2025PolaFormer: Polarity-aware Linear Attention for Vision Transformerscited by 32
  25. 2024CLEAR: Conv-Like Linearization Revs Pre-Trained Diffusion Transformers Upcited by 28
  26. 2025HiFlow: Training-free High-Resolution Image Generation with Flow-Aligned Guidancecited by 22
  27. 2025DiTFastAttnV2: Head-wise Attention Compression for Multi-Modality Diffusion Transformerscited by 20
  28. 2025LayerCraft: Enhancing Text-to-Image Generation with CoT Reasoning and Layered Object Integrationcited by 19
  29. 2025Grouping First, Attending Smartly: Training-Free Acceleration for Diffusion Transformerscited by 13
  30. 2025RAGSR: Regional Attention Guided Diffusion for Image Super-Resolutioncited by 3
  31. 2025Can We Achieve Efficient Diffusion without Self-Attention? Distilling Self-Attention into Convolutionscited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025UltraGen: High-Resolution Video Generation with Hierarchical Attention
  2. 2025UltraHR-100K: Enhancing UHR Image Synthesis with A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset
  3. 2025UltraImage: Rethinking Resolution Extrapolation in Image Diffusion Transformers
  4. 2025Local-Global Context-Aware and Structure-Preserving Image Super-Resolution
  5. 2026DreamSR: Towards Ultra-High-Resolution Image Super-Resolution via a Receptive-Field Enhanced Diffusion Transformer
  6. 2025Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis: Data, Method and Evaluation
  7. 2026Spatial Gram Alignment for Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis
  8. 2025Make It Efficient: Dynamic Sparse Attention for Autoregressive Image Generation