One-step Diffusion Models with $f$-Divergence Distribution Matching (2502.15681v2)

Abstract: Sampling from diffusion models involves a slow iterative process that hinders their practical deployment, especially for interactive applications. To accelerate generation speed, recent approaches distill a multi-step diffusion model into a single-step student generator via variational score distillation, which matches the distribution of samples generated by the student to the teacher's distribution. However, these approaches use the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence for distribution matching which is known to be mode seeking. In this paper, we generalize the distribution matching approach using a novel $f$-divergence minimization framework, termed $f$-distill, that covers different divergences with different trade-offs in terms of mode coverage and training variance. We derive the gradient of the $f$-divergence between the teacher and student distributions and show that it is expressed as the product of their score differences and a weighting function determined by their density ratio. This weighting function naturally emphasizes samples with higher density in the teacher distribution, when using a less mode-seeking divergence. We observe that the popular variational score distillation approach using the reverse-KL divergence is a special case within our framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that alternative $f$-divergences, such as forward-KL and Jensen-Shannon divergences, outperform the current best variational score distillation methods across image generation tasks. In particular, when using Jensen-Shannon divergence, $f$-distill achieves current state-of-the-art one-step generation performance on ImageNet64 and zero-shot text-to-image generation on MS-COCO. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/f-distill

• The paper introduces $f$-distill, a generalized framework that minimizes $f$-divergence between teacher and student distributions to achieve one-step diffusion model sampling.
• The $f$-distill framework's gradient is formulated based on the score difference and a weighting function, generalizing previous methods and enabling exploration of divergences like JS.
• Experiments show that $f$-distill using JS divergence achieves state-of-the-art one-step generation on datasets like ImageNet-64 and zero-shot MS-COCO.

Here is an executive summary of the paper, as you requested:

This paper introduces $f$-distill, a generalized distillation framework that minimizes the $f$-divergence between the teacher and student distributions to accelerate diffusion model sampling to a single step.

• The framework's gradient is expressed as the product of the score difference between the teacher and student models and a weighting function determined by the density ratio and the chosen $f$-divergence.
• $f$-distill encompasses existing variational score distillation methods as a special case and allows for the exploration of less mode-seeking divergences such as forward-KL and Jensen-Shannon (JS).
• Experiments demonstrate that $f$-distill with JS divergence achieves state-of-the-art one-step generation performance on ImageNet-64 and zero-shot MS-COCO, highlighting the benefits of balancing mode coverage and gradient variance.