Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

Align Your Steps: Optimizing Sampling Schedules in Diffusion Models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2404.14507 v1 pith:HZMBNDPF submitted 2024-04-22 cs.CV cs.LG

classification cs.CVcs.LG
keywords samplingschedulesapproachaligndifferentdiffusionhand-craftedmodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
abstract

Diffusion models (DMs) have established themselves as the state-of-the-art generative modeling approach in the visual domain and beyond. A crucial drawback of DMs is their slow sampling speed, relying on many sequential function evaluations through large neural networks. Sampling from DMs can be seen as solving a differential equation through a discretized set of noise levels known as the sampling schedule. While past works primarily focused on deriving efficient solvers, little attention has been given to finding optimal sampling schedules, and the entire literature relies on hand-crafted heuristics. In this work, for the first time, we propose a general and principled approach to optimizing the sampling schedules of DMs for high-quality outputs, called $\textit{Align Your Steps}$. We leverage methods from stochastic calculus and find optimal schedules specific to different solvers, trained DMs and datasets. We evaluate our novel approach on several image, video as well as 2D toy data synthesis benchmarks, using a variety of different samplers, and observe that our optimized schedules outperform previous hand-crafted schedules in almost all experiments. Our method demonstrates the untapped potential of sampling schedule optimization, especially in the few-step synthesis regime.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Asymptotic Preservation and Uniform Accuracy of Diffusion and Flow-Matching Samplers

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.5 of 10

    DDIM (σ-clock Euler) is the unique layer-exact fixed-step sampler; deterministic residual budgets stay O(1) with no log(1/σ_min), while stochastic path-KL scales as Λ²/N from the Itô term alone.

  2. A Decomposable Probe for Few-Step Diffusion Models: Prompt, Latent, and Score Selectivity across Backbone Families and Distillation Paradigms

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5 of 10

    A three-layer perturbation probe shows latent selectivity is a near-binary rectified-flow fingerprint that survives ADD distillation, while score selectivity tracks distillation objective across 23 T2I models.

  3. Amortized Moment Matching for Visual Generation

    cs.LG 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

    Amortized Fréchet Distance uses neural nets to match conditional means and covariances, yielding stronger one-step visual generators than explicit FD-loss or multi-step teachers.

  4. SANTS: A State-Adaptive Scheduler for World Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    SANTS adaptively chooses denoising depth in video-based robot action diffusion policies using a state-dependent stopping hazard and noise ratio, trained via downstream action reward to reduce latency.

  5. Differentiable Solver Search for Fast Diffusion Sampling

    cs.CV 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A differentiable search over solver coefficients and sampling timesteps produces a fast diffusion sampler that outperforms DPM-Solver++ and UniPC at 5 to 10 steps.

  6. A Comprehensive Review on Noise Control of Diffusion Model

    cs.LG 2025-02 unverdicted

    A survey of nine diffusion model noise schedules that restates existing formulas and the known conclusion that schedule choice affects generation quality.

Pith tools