Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Gaussian Process Rectified Feature Cache

Abstract

Diffusion Transformers have become the dominant paradigm in generative AI, but their high computational costs severely hinder real-time applications. Prediction-based feature caching is widely used to accelerate diffusion transformers; however, as the number of steps increases, the deviation between its predictions and the reference full-compute trajectory gradually grows. An intuitive idea is to use an online regression model to dynamically correct this deviation, but it faces the issue of label data being unavailable during the acceleration process. This paper presents a statistical observation that the residuals between the features of full computation steps using caching methods and reference full-compute trajectory locally exhibit a zero-mean Gaussian distribution. By treating the features of full computation steps as noisy observations of reference features, the data acquisition problem is resolved. Based on this observation, a plug-and-play GP-Refiner correction framework is proposed. This method utilizes Gaussian Process Regression for correction and, leveraging the properties of GPR, introduces an uncertainty-adaptive computation strategy that triggers necessary full-computation calibration by monitoring the posterior variance in real time. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements across different models when combined with various state-of-the-art methods. Integrating the proposed framework with TaylorSeer reduces the computational load by 19.3% while improving PSNR by 0.9 dB and reducing LPIPS from 0.46 to 0.29. Code is available in https://github.com/Aredstone/GP-Refiner.