Adaptive Guidance: Training-free Acceleration of Conditional Diffusion Models

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the role of Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) in text-conditioned diffusion models from the perspective of inference efficiency. In particular, we relax the default choice of applying CFG in all diffusion steps and instead propose to search for more efficient guidance policies. We formulate the discovery of such policies in the framework of differentiable neural architecture search. Our findings suggest that, as denoising progresses, the updates produced by CFG become increasingly aligned with simple conditional steps, which renders CFG's additional neural network evaluation redundant, especially in the second half of the denoising process. Building upon this insight, we propose "Adaptive Guidance" (AG), an efficient variant of CFG that adaptively omits network evaluations when the denoising process displays convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AG preserves CFG's image quality while reducing computation by 25%. Thus, AG constitutes a plug-and-play alternative to Guidance Distillation, achieving 50% of the speed-ups of the latter, while being training-free and retaining the capacity to handle negative prompts. We conclude by uncovering further redundancies of CFG in the first half of the diffusion process, showing that entire neural network evaluations can be replaced by simple affine transformations of past score estimates.