BlockDance: Reuse Structurally Similar Spatio-Temporal Features to Accelerate Diffusion Transformers (2503.15927v1)

Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive generation capabilities, particularly with recent advancements leveraging transformer architectures to improve both visual and artistic quality. However, Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) continue to encounter challenges related to low inference speed, primarily due to the iterative denoising process. To address this issue, we propose BlockDance, a training-free approach that explores feature similarities at adjacent time steps to accelerate DiTs. Unlike previous feature-reuse methods that lack tailored reuse strategies for features at different scales, BlockDance prioritizes the identification of the most structurally similar features, referred to as Structurally Similar Spatio-Temporal (STSS) features. These features are primarily located within the structure-focused blocks of the transformer during the later stages of denoising. BlockDance caches and reuses these highly similar features to mitigate redundant computation, thereby accelerating DiTs while maximizing consistency with the generated results of the original model. Furthermore, considering the diversity of generated content and the varying distributions of redundant features, we introduce BlockDance-Ada, a lightweight decision-making network tailored for instance-specific acceleration. BlockDance-Ada dynamically allocates resources and provides superior content quality. Both BlockDance and BlockDance-Ada have proven effective across various generation tasks and models, achieving accelerations between 25% and 50% while maintaining generation quality.