Holistic Latent Diffusion Acceleration: Unifying Spatial, Temporal, and Architectural Efficiency
Abstract
Latent Diffusion Models (LDM) face three compounding efficiency challenges in practical deployment: i) the temporal latency of iterative sampling; ii) the architectural overhead of heavy backbone parameter counts; and iii) the spatial cost of high-dimensional latent grids. While recent acceleration methods have made substantial progress on temporal distillation and architectural compression, the spatial axis is often inherited from the teacher tokenizer and treated as fixed. In this work, we recast latent resolution as an optimizable efficiency axis and introduce a unified framework that optimizes all three dimensions simultaneously. We introduce a novel strategy of Score-Compatible Tokenizer Distillation (SCTD), which leverages score-matching principles to align a spatially compact latent space with the induced distribution of a frozen, powerful teacher model, distilling the teacher's generative prior into a compressed, lower-dimensional compatible manifold. With flexibility provided by SCTD, we can surrogate a computationally heavy teacher backbone with a lightweight student architecture operating strictly within this new compressed space. Finally, we apply temporal distillation to collapse the sampling trajectory, producing a one-step generator that operates at peak efficiency. Our method yields a student generator outperforming existing single-axis acceleration methods in efficiency and throughput, while maintaining competitive generation quality. With reduced peak memory usage and latency, our method enables resource-constrained deployment and high-volume serving of high-fidelity LDM.