# EpaCache: Error-Propagation-Aware Caching for Accelerating Diffusion-Based Visual Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29264/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [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)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [UniPC: A Unified Predictor-Corrector Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04867/) (2023)
- [Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14156/) (2021)
- [Post-training Quantization on Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15736/) (2022)
- [T2V-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14505/) (2024)
- [Delta-DiT: A Training-Free Acceleration Method Tailored for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01125/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Video Generation with Pyramid Attention Broadcast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12588/) (2024)
- [From Reusing to Forecasting: Accelerating Diffusion Models with TaylorSeers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06923/) (2025)
- [FasterCache: Training-Free Video Diffusion Model Acceleration with High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19355/) (2024)
- [DiTFastAttn: Attention Compression for Diffusion Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08552/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Caching for Faster Video Generation with Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02397/) (2024)
- [Sparse VideoGen2: Accelerate Video Generation with Sparse Attention via Semantic-Aware Permutation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18875/) (2025)
- [Q-DiT: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17343/) (2024)
- [SLA: Beyond Sparsity in Diffusion Transformers via Fine-Tunable Sparse-Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24006/) (2025)
- [DiCache: Let Diffusion Model Determine Its Own Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17356/) (2025)
- [MagCache: Fast Video Generation with Magnitude-Aware Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09045/) (2025)

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

- [Equal Path Cost, Unequal Output Effects: Understanding Perturbation Propagation in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11380/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based visual generative models deliver strong image and video synthesis quality but incur high inference costs because sequential samplers repeatedly evaluate large networks. Caching-based methods reduce inference latency by reusing intermediate computations across adjacent timesteps. However, existing cache controllers rely primarily on local temporal variation and overlook the trajectory-level consequences of cache reuse. We introduce Error-Propagation-Aware Cache (EpaCache), a training-free caching policy that adaptively allocates the reuse budget on timesteps with lower downstream impact. Experiments on image and video synthesis models demonstrate that EpaCache consistently improves the latency--fidelity trade-off over existing caching methods. On FLUX.1-dev, EpaCache outperforms the prior state-of-the-art caching method in both latency and fidelity, reducing inference time from 11.7 s to 11.3 s while improving PSNR from 21.4 to 22.8. On HunyuanVideo, EpaCache achieves a 2.63× speedup over uncached inference and improves SSIM from 0.891 to 0.905 over the prior state-of-the-art method at matched latency.