Linear Multistep Solver Distillation for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models

Sampling from diffusion models can be seen as solving the corresponding probability flow ordinary differential equation (ODE). The solving process requires a significant number of function evaluations (NFE), making it time-consuming. Recently, several solver search frameworks have attempted to find better-performing model-specific solvers. However, predicting the impact of intermediate solving strategies on final sample quality remains challenging, rendering the search process inefficient. In this paper, we propose a novel method for designing solving strategies. We first introduce a unified prediction formula for linear multistep solvers. Subsequently, we present a solver distillation framework, which enables a student solver to mimic the sampling trajectory generated by a teacher solver with more steps. We utilize the mean Euclidean distance between the student and teacher sampling trajectories as a metric, facilitating rapid adjustment and optimization of intermediate solving strategies. The design space of our framework encompasses multiple aspects, including prediction coefficients, time step schedules, and time scaling factors. Our framework has the ability to complete a solver search for Stable-Diffusion in under 12 total GPU hours. Compared to previous reinforcement learning-based search frameworks, our approach achieves over a 10× increase in search efficiency. With just 5 NFE, we achieve FID scores of 3.23 on CIFAR10, 7.16 on ImageNet-64, 5.44 on LSUN-Bedroom, and 12.52 on MS-COCO, resulting in a 2× sampling acceleration ratio compared to handcrafted solvers.