Elastic Token Compression for Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers

Natural images concentrate their detail in a small fraction of the frame, yet diffusion models spend a full token on every patch, in every layer and at every timestep. The waste is largest in pixel-space models, with no autoencoder to absorb low-level redundancy first. Probing a pretrained pixel text-to-image transformer, we find its middle-block tokens redundant wherever the image is flat. The redundancy occupies connected, content-shaped regions, and exploiting it requires tokens with the same geometry. Cutting a Hilbert ordering of the patches provides them. Consecutive positions are always image neighbours, so any contiguous run is a connected region whose size and shape follow the content, and grouping in two dimensions becomes a cut in one. Existing reductions each lose part of this. Similarity merging scatters its groups, latent bottlenecks discard position, and skipping deletes what it should summarize. We cut where the model's features change most and pool each run into one region token. Our Region Token Interface (method) adapts a diffusion model to these tokens, with the region count drawn at random during fine-tuning so one checkpoint serves every budget. method leads prior reduction methods at matched budgets, matches dense quality at 2.0× the speed, and stays close at 2.6×. The code and models are open-sourced at https://eduardzamfir.github.io/rti