# Evolving Cache Schedules for Fast Diffusion Policy Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20293 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20293/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 27 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [UniPC: A Unified Predictor-Corrector Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04867/) (2023)
- [DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00858/) (2023)
- [Progressive Differentiable Architecture Search: Bridging the Depth Gap between Search and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12760/) (2019)
- [Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Token-wise Feature Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05317/) (2024)
- [Cache Me if You Can: Accelerating Diffusion Models through Block Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03209/) (2023)
- [Real-Time Video Generation with Pyramid Attention Broadcast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12588/) (2024)
- [Learning-to-Cache: Accelerating Diffusion Transformer via Layer Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01733/) (2024)
- [FORA: Fast-Forward Caching in Diffusion Transformer Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01425/) (2024)
- [FasterCache: Training-Free Video Diffusion Model Acceleration with High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19355/) (2024)
- [EfficientVLA: Training-Free Acceleration and Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10100/) (2025)
- [One-Step Diffusion Policy: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21257/) (2024)
- [Block-wise Adaptive Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13456/) (2025)
- [Sparse ActionGen: Accelerating Diffusion Policy with Real-time Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12894/) (2026)
- [Relational Feature Caching for Accelerating Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19506/) (2026)
- [Efficiently Learning Small Policies for Locomotion and Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00140/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ReSync: Re-Aligning the Two Clocks of Asynchronous World-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33944/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion policies achieve strong visuomotor control by iteratively denoising action chunks, but repeated denoising makes real-time deployment computationally demanding. Cache-based methods reduce inference cost by reusing intermediate activations, but existing training-free schedules typically allocate computation uniformly across blocks, ignoring heterogeneous redundancy across blocks and leading to a suboptimal performance-efficiency trade-off. To bridge this gap, we introduce Evolving Cache Schedules (EVO), a training-free acceleration framework that globally schedules cache refreshes via evolutionary search. EVO represents each candidate as a complete schedule over the block-timestep lattice. Thus, redundant transformer computations during iterative denoising can be skipped through cache reuse while preserving closed-loop rollout performance. To make the search practical, EVO introduces redundancy-aware initialization, which seeds the population with promising schedules, and target-conditioned early stopping, which verifies and terminates once a desired performance target is reached. The offline-optimized schedule can be directly plugged into pretrained diffusion policies without retraining. Extensive manipulation benchmarks show that EVO preserves near-full performance while substantially reducing computation, achieving up to 8.05x action-generation speedup and reducing FLOPs from 15.77G to as low as 1.96G. Source code is available at https://github.com/pillom/EVO.