Diffusion Transformer (DiT), a promising diffusion model for visual generation, demonstrates impressive performance but incurs significant computational overhead. Intriguingly, analysis of pre-trained DiT models reveals that global selfattention is often redundant, predominantly capturing local patterns--highlighting the potential for more efficient alternatives. In this paper, we revisit convolution as an alternative building block for constructing efficient and expressive diffusion models. However, naively replacing self-attention with convolution typically results in degraded performance. Our investigations attribute this performance gap to the higher channel redundancy in ConvNets compared to Transformers. To resolve this, we introduce a compact channel attention mechanism that promotes the activation of more diverse channels, thereby enhancing feature diversity.

We propose a principled and effective framework for one-step generative modeling. We introduce the notion of average velocity to characterize flow fields, in contrast to instantaneous velocity modeled by Flow Matching methods. A welldefined identity between average and instantaneous velocities is derived and used to guide neural network training. Our method, termed the MeanFlow model, is self-contained and requires no pre-training, distillation, or curriculum learning. MeanFlow demonstrates strong empirical performance: it achieves an FID of 3.43 with a single function evaluation (1-NFE) on ImageNet 256 256 trained from scratch, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art one-step diffusion/flow models. Our study substantially narrows the gap between one-step diffusion/flow models and their multi-step predecessors, and we hope it will motivate future research to revisit the foundations of these powerful models.

Representation Alignment (REPA) that aligns Diffusion Transformer (DiT) hiddenstates with ViT visual encoders has proven highly effective in DiT training, demonstrating superior convergence properties, but it has not been validated on the canonical diffusion U-Net architecture that shows faster convergence compared to DiTs. However, adapting REPA to U-Net architectures presents unique challenges: (1) different block functionalities necessitate revised alignment strategies; (2) spatial-dimension inconsistencies emerge from U-Net's spatial downsampling operations; (3) space gaps between U-Net and ViT hinder the effectiveness of tokenwise alignment. To encounter these challenges, we propose U-REPA, a representation alignment paradigm that bridges U-Net hidden states and ViT features as follows: Firstly, we propose via observation that due to skip connection, the middle stage of U-Net is the best alignment option. Secondly, we propose upsampling of U-Net features after passing them through MLPs. Thirdly, we observe difficulty when performing tokenwise similarity alignment, and further introduces a manifold loss that regularizes the relative similarity between samples. Experiments indicate that the resulting U-REPA could achieve excellent generation quality and greatly accelerates the convergence speed. With CFG guidance interval, U-REPA could reach FID < 1.5 in 200 epochs or 1M iterations on ImageNet 256 256, and needs only half the total epochs to perform better than REPA under sd-vae-ft-ema.

Our method's efficacy is demonstrated on the class-conditional ImageNet generation benchmark, where

Unconditional generation--the problem of modeling data distribution without relying on human-annotated labels--is a long-standing and fundamental challenge in generative models, creating a potential of learning from large-scale unlabeled data. In the literature, the generation quality of an unconditional method has been much worse than that of its conditional counterpart. This gap can be attributed to the lack of semantic information provided by labels. In this work, we show that one can close this gap by generating semantic representations in the representation space produced by a self-supervised encoder. These representations can be used to condition the image generator.

Code is available at https://github.com/wl-zhao/UniPC . In this paper, we propose a training-free framework for the fast sampling of DPMs called UniPC .

DiTs (U-DiTs) in the paper and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the extraordinary performance of U-DiT models.