# DRiffusion: Draft-and-Refine Process Parallelizes Diffusion Models with Ease

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25872 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25872/

## 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 13 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [GeoDiff: a Geometric Diffusion Model for Molecular Conformation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02923/) (2022)
- [DiffDock: Diffusion Steps, Twists, and Turns for Molecular Docking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01776/) (2022)
- [Progressive Distillation for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00512/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-fidelity content but suffer from slow, iterative sampling, resulting in high latency that limits their use in interactive applications. We introduce DRiffusion, a parallel sampling framework that parallelizes diffusion inference through a draft-and-refine process. DRiffusion employs skip transitions to generate multiple draft states for future timesteps and computes their corresponding noises in parallel, which are then used in the standard denoising process to produce refined results. Theoretically, our method achieves an acceleration rate of tfrac1n or tfrac2n+1, depending on whether the conservative or aggressive mode is used, where n denotes the number of devices. Empirically, DRiffusion attains 1.4×-3.7× speedup across multiple diffusion models while incur minimal degradation in generation quality: on MS-COCO dataset, both FID and CLIP remain largely on par with those of the original model, while PickScore and HPSv2.1 show only minor average drops of 0.17 and 0.43, respectively. These results verify that DRiffusion delivers substantial acceleration and preserves perceptual quality.