ToDo: Token Downsampling for Efficient Generation of High-Resolution Images

Abstract

Attention has been a crucial component in the success of image diffusion models, however, their quadratic computational complexity limits the sizes of images we can process within reasonable time and memory constraints. This paper investigates the importance of dense attention in generative image models, which often contain redundant features, making them suitable for sparser attention mechanisms. We propose a novel training-free method ToDo that relies on token downsampling of key and value tokens to accelerate Stable Diffusion inference by up to 2x for common sizes and up to 4.5x or more for high resolutions like 2048 × 2048. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods in balancing efficient throughput and fidelity.