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Poster

U-DiTs: Downsample Tokens in U-Shaped Diffusion Transformers

Yuchuan Tian · Zhijun Tu · Hanting Chen · Jie Hu · Chao Xu · Yunhe Wang

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Fri 13 Dec 11 a.m. PST — 2 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) introduce the transformer architecture to diffusion tasks for latent-space image generation. With an isotropic architecture that chains a series of transformer blocks, DiTs demonstrate competitive performance and good scalability; but meanwhile, the abandonment of U-Net by DiTs and their following improvements is worth rethinking. To this end, we conduct a simple toy experiment by comparing a U-Net architectured DiT with an isotropic one. It turns out that the U-Net architecture only gain a slight advantage amid the U-Net inductive bias, indicating potential redundancies within the U-Net-style DiT. Inspired by the discovery that U-Net backbone features are low-frequency-dominated, we perform token downsampling on the query-key-value tuple for self-attention and bring further improvements despite a considerable amount of reduction in computation. Based on self-attention with downsampled tokens, we propose a series of U-shaped DiTs (U-DiTs) in the paper and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the extraordinary performance of U-DiT models. The proposed U-DiT could outperform DiT-XL with only 1/6 of its computation cost.

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