Multi-Architecture Multi-Expert Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have achieved impressive results in generating diverse and realistic data by employing multi-step denoising processes. However, the need for accommodating significant variations in input noise at each time-step has led to diffusion models requiring a large number of parameters for their denoisers. We have observed that diffusion models effectively act as filters for different frequency ranges at each time-step noise. While some previous works have introduced multi-expert strategies, assigning denoisers to different noise intervals, they overlook the importance of specialized operations for high and low frequencies. For instance, self-attention operations are effective at handling low-frequency components (low-pass filters), while convolutions excel at capturing high-frequency features (high-pass filters). In other words, existing diffusion models employ denoisers with the same architecture, without considering the optimal operations for each time-step noise. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach called Multi-architecturE Multi-Expert (MEME), which consists of multiple experts with specialized architectures tailored to the operations required at each time-step interval. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEME outperforms large competitors in terms of both generation performance and computational efficiency.