Zhu_DiMO_Distilling_Masked_Diffusion_Models_into_One-step_Generator@ICCV2025@CVF

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#1 Di[M]O: Distilling Masked Diffusion Models into One-step Generator [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Yuanzhi Zhu, Xi Wang, Stéphane Lathuilière, Vicky Kalogeiton

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique. Despite their remarkable results, they typically suffer from slow inference with several steps. In this paper, we propose Di\mathtt [M] O, a novel approach that distills masked diffusion models into a one-step generator.Di\mathtt [M] O addresses two key challenges: (1) the intractability of using intermediate-step information for one-step generation, which we solve through token-level distribution matching that optimizes model output logits by an `on-policy framework' with the help of an auxiliary model; and (2) the lack of entropy in the initial distribution, which we address through a token initialization strategy that injects randomness while maintaining similarity to teacher training distribution. We show Di\mathtt [M] O's effectiveness on both class-conditional and text-conditional image generation, impressively achieving performance competitive to multi-step teacher outputs while drastically reducing inference time. To our knowledge, we are the first to successfully achieve one-step distillation of masked diffusion models and the first to apply discrete distillation to text-to-image generation, opening new paths for efficient generative modeling.

Subject: ICCV.2025 - Poster