# StrideDiffusion: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Time-series Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20545 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20545/

## 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 28 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00858/) (2023)
- [Autoregressive Denoising Diffusion Models for Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12072/) (2021)
- [Timestep Embedding Tells: It's Time to Cache for Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19108/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-TS: Interpretable Diffusion for General Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01742/) (2024)
- [Generative Modelling With Inverse Heat Dissipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13397/) (2022)
- [Cache Me if You Can: Accelerating Diffusion Models through Block Caching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03209/) (2023)
- [Leapfrog Diffusion Model for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10895/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Model Made Slim](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17106/) (2022)
- [DistriFusion: Distributed Parallel Inference for High-Resolution Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19481/) (2024)
- [VideoLCM: Video Latent Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09109/) (2023)
- [SANA-Sprint: One-Step Diffusion with Continuous-Time Consistency Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09641/) (2025)
- [Temporal Dynamic Quantization for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02316/) (2023)
- [Non-autoregressive Conditional Diffusion Models for Time Series Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05043/) (2023)
- [EfficientDM: Efficient Quantization-Aware Fine-Tuning of Low-Bit Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03270/) (2023)
- [On the Constrained Time-Series Generation Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01717/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion Models for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18712/) (2024)
- [Faster Diffusion: Rethinking the Role of the Encoder for Diffusion Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09608/) (2023)
- [Non-stationary Diffusion For Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04278/) (2025)
- [Beta Sampling is All You Need: Efficient Image Generation Strategy for Diffusion Models using Stepwise Spectral Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12173/) (2024)
- [FreqPrior: Improving Video Diffusion Models with Frequency Filtering Gaussian Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03496/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have become competitive generators for time series, but their practical use is limited by the large number of sequential denoising steps required at inference time. Existing fast samplers typically use fixed or generic timestep schedules, overlooking a distinctive property of time-series diffusion: different spectral bands evolve at different rates during the reverse process. We introduce StrideDiffusion, a training-free spectral-aware sampler that adaptively selects the denoising stride from band-level activity. At each step, StrideDiffusion monitors relative band energy, log-power drift, and phase velocity to identify whether high- frequency dynamics remain active or whether the trajectory is dominated by stable low-frequency structure. It then takes fine steps when rapidly varying bands are active and larger jumps once only coarse components remain. A bandwise stability analysis shows that inactive frequency bands change only linearly with the jump size under deterministic affine reverse updates, providing a local justification for spectral activity as a step-size indicator. Across six unconditional time-series generation benchmarks, StrideDiffusion uses only 14-66 function evaluations instead of 500/1000 denoising steps, achieving up to 18.9x wall-clock speedup while preserving or improving generation quality. On conditional imputation and forecasting, it further delivers 5-14x average acceleration with comparable predictive accuracy. These results show that spectral evolution provides a practical and principled signal for fast time-series diffusion sampling. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/stridediff-ts.