Ditto: Accelerating Diffusion Model via Temporal Value Similarity

Diffusion models achieve superior performance in image generation tasks. However, it incurs significant computation overheads due to its iterative structure. To address these overheads, we analyze this iterative structure and observe that adjacent time steps in diffusion models exhibit high value similarity, leading to narrower differences between consecutive time steps. We adapt these characteristics to a quantized diffusion model and reveal that the majority of these differences can be represented with reduced bit-width, and even zero. Based on our observations, we propose the Ditto algorithm, a difference processing algorithm that leverages temporal similarity with quantization to enhance the efficiency of diffusion models. By exploiting the narrower differences and the distributive property of layer operations, it performs full bit-width operations for the initial time step and processes subsequent steps with temporal differences. In addition, Ditto execution flow optimization is designed to mitigate the memory overhead of temporal difference processing, further boosting the efficiency of the Ditto algorithm. We also design the Ditto hardware, a specialized hardware accelerator, fully exploiting the dynamic characteristics of the proposed algorithm. As a result, the Ditto hardware achieves up to 1.5x speedup and 17.74% energy saving compared to other accelerators.

REPrune: Channel Pruning via Kernel Representative Selection

Channel pruning is widely accepted to accelerate modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The resulting pruned model benefits from its immediate deployment on general-purpose software and hardware resources. However, its large pruning granularity, specifically at the unit of a convolution filter, often leads to undesirable accuracy drops due to the inflexibility of deciding how and where to introduce sparsity to the CNNs. In this paper, we propose REPrune, a novel channel pruning technique that emulates kernel pruning, fully exploiting the finer but structured granularity. REPrune identifies similar kernels within each channel using agglomerative clustering. Then, it selects filters that maximize the incorporation of kernel representatives while optimizing the maximum cluster coverage problem. By integrating with a simultaneous training-pruning paradigm, REPrune promotes efficient, progressive pruning throughout training CNNs, avoiding the conventional train-prune-finetune sequence. Experimental results highlight that REPrune performs better in computer vision tasks than existing methods, effectively achieving a balance between acceleration ratio and performance retention.