# DiffSparse: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Learned Token Sparsity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03674/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 51 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

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

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00858/) (2023)
- [Timestep Embedding Tells: It's Time to Cache for Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19108/) (2024)
- [Structural Pruning for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10924/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28185/) (2026)
- [AssetGen: Deployable 3D Asset Generation at Interactive Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26137/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models demonstrate outstanding performance in image generation, but their multi-step inference mechanism requires immense computational cost. Previous works accelerate inference by leveraging layer or token cache techniques to reduce computational cost. However, these methods fail to achieve superior acceleration performance in few-step diffusion transformer models due to inefficient feature caching strategies, manually designed sparsity allocation, and the practice of retaining complete forward computations in several steps in these token cache methods. To tackle these challenges, we propose a differentiable layer-wise sparsity optimization framework for diffusion transformer models, leveraging token caching to reduce token computation costs and enhance acceleration. Our method optimizes layer-wise sparsity allocation in an end-to-end manner through a learnable network combined with a dynamic programming solver. Additionally, our proposed two-stage training strategy eliminates the need for full-step processing in existing methods, further improving efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments on a range of diffusion-transformer models, including DiT-XL/2, PixArt-α, FLUX, and Wan2.1. Across these architectures, our method consistently improves efficiency without degrading sample quality. For example, on PixArt-α with 20 sampling steps, we reduce computational cost by 54% while achieving generation metrics that surpass those of the original model, substantially outperforming prior approaches. These results demonstrate that our method delivers large efficiency gains while often improving generation quality.