APT, a software-hardware co-designed accelerator for high-resolution DiTs that leverages attention probabilities as a unified importance metric to jointly optimize computation through fine-grained pruning and adaptive precision scaling, and is evaluated on SOTA DiT models including PixArt, Stable Diffusion 3, and FLUX.
Abstract
Recent advances in generative AI have significantly increased the demand for high-resolution image and video generation, positioning diffusion models as a core technology. Among them, Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have emerged as the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models due to their scalability and output quality. However, self-attention in DiTs incurs significant computational overhead, leading to excessively long latency as the complexity grows with the fourth power of the output resolution. While prior works have attempted to mitigate this cost using sparsity and quantization techniques, they fall short of effectively reducing the computational cost in high-resolution DiTs. In this paper, we present APT, a software-hardware co-designed accelerator for high-resolution DiTs. APT leverages attention probabilities as a unified importance metric to jointly optimize computation through fine-grained pruning and adaptive precision scaling. At the algorithm level, we propose Attention Probability-guided Adaptive Dual Thresholding (APDT), which dynamically performs element selection and precision assignment using dual thresholds. To ensure compatibility with memory-efficient FlashAttention, we introduce Timestep-Aware FlashAttention (TAFA), which predicts attention probabilities across timesteps by exploiting temporal similarity. At the architecture level, we co-design a specialized accelerator that efficiently supports irregular sparsity and dual-precision execution, featuring dynamic mask management, address translation, dual-precision compute units, and a tile-based dataflow. Finally, we evaluate APT on SOTA DiT models, including PixArt-$\alpha$, Stable Diffusion 3, and FLUX. APT achieves up to 8.16$\times$ speedup and 14.98$\times$ higher energy efficiency over NVIDIA A100, and up to 3.01$\times$ speedup and 2.04$\times$ higher energy efficiency over EXION, a SOTA diffusion model accelerator.
DSTAR, a software-hardware co-design framework that accelerates DiT inference by reducing spatial and temporal redundancy and incorporates a sparse attention reuse mechanism to minimize redundant computation in attention layers, and design a specialized hardware accelerator which achieves high efficiency in both latency and energy consumption.
Chi Zhang, Jieru Zhao, Yu Feng et al.· arXiv.org· 2 citations
The exceptional generative capabilities of modern diffusion models are fundamentally bottlenecked by the quadratic computational complexity of their attention mechanisms. While recent feature caching strategies attempt to accelerate inference by skipping layers at static intervals, they fail to account for the non-linear evolution of latent features, inevitably causing severe structural distortions and temporal flickering. To address this, we propose AST-ToMe (Adaptive Step-Aware Thresholding), a novel dynamic gating mechanism that utilizes a runtime L2 norm feature drift metric to adaptively determine whether to compute or reuse attention states. Furthermore, we extend AST-ToMe to video stream generation through a cross-frame state inheritance design. Experimental results demonstrate that for single-image synthesis, AST-ToMe achieves a 15.3% reduction in inference latency with near-lossless perceptual quality (LPIPS: 0.0023). In continuous video generation, our method not only accelerates inference but also serves as a robust temporal anchor. By effectively suppressing random stochastic variations, AST-ToMe successfully reduces Temporal Jitter from 0.2059 to 0.1865, paving a highly efficient path for stable, flicker-free video generation.
Shu-Zhi Zheng· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Video diffusion transformers (vDiTs) generate high quality video but introduce extremely high compute cost due to the long diffusion timesteps and self attention computation. As diffusion timesteps are reduced, the computation cost of self attention becomes the dominant bottleneck. Existing acceleration approaches largely inherit sparse attention techniques from large language models, which fail to consider the unique spatiotemporal correlation of video data. This paper presents Kaleido, an algorithm hardware codesign that accelerates all operations in vDiTs by exploiting channel-wise spatiotemporal correlations in latent space. Based on this insight, we propose a lightweight channelwise reuse algorithm that skips redundant computations by reusing partial results while preserving higher generative quality than prior methods (>17 dB). To efficiently support this algorithm, we design a systolic array like accelerator with reconfigurable processing elements and a lightweight data dispatcher to mitigate irregular sparsity and data access patterns introduced by our reuse algorithm. Evaluations across three mainstream vDiT models show that Kaleido achieves up to 5.9x speedup and 16.0x energy savings over state of the art accelerators.
Wenxuan Miao, Haosong Liu, Weiming Hu et al.· arXiv.org· 1 citation
High-resolution video diffusion models built on Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) deliver strong fidelity but quickly exhaust the memory budget of a single workstation. A 100 billion-plus parameter DiT easily requires over a terabyte of persistent state, while naive spatiotemporal self-attention grows quadratically in sequence length. These two walls -- parameter memory and activation memory -- prevent researchers from adapting massive generative models without large GPU clusters. We revisit this problem from a systems perspective and introduce MegaSlide-DiT, a prototype that demonstrates how a pre-trained 105B DiT can be adapted on a single H200 GPU with 1.5 TB of host RAM. Our key insight is that the GPU need not own the model state: all persistent weights, master weights and optimizer moments remain in host memory, while only transient shards are streamed to the GPU on demand. Simultaneously, we replace quadratic global attention with 3D Deformable Slide Attention (3D-DSA), a motion-adaptive local attention operator that reduces both memory and computational complexity to linear in the sequence length. We report detailed memory accounting, execution traces and evaluation results to substantiate our design. MegaSlide-DiT does not claim to train a 105B model from scratch on a single GPU, nor does it magically solve bandwidth limits; rather, it offers a pragmatic path for full-parameter adaptation of massive video diffusion models on high-end workstations.
This paper introduces training-free Sol-Attn (Sparsifying online attention), which unifies dynamic routing, sparse computation, and approximation correction in a single online-softmax pass, achieving a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off in sparse attention.
SPADE is presented, a training-free sparse-attention engine of three parts: a specification defining 3D blocking candidates and formalizing dynamic masks via Summarizer/Estimator expressions, and an executor with low-overhead index search, flash block-sparse attention, and kernel grouping.
Shanghao Liu, Renze Chen, Size Zheng et al.· 0 citations
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