Hardware-Friendly Diffusion Models with Fixed-Size Reusable Structures for On-Device Image Generation

Abstract

Vision Transformers and U-Net architectures have been widely adopted in the implementation of Diffusion Models. However, each architecture presents specific challenges while realizing them on-device. Vision Transformers require positional embedding to maintain correspondence between the tokens processed by the transformer, although they offer the advantage of using fixed-size, reusable repetitive blocks following tokenization. The U-Net architecture lacks these attributes, as it utilizes variable-sized intermediate blocks for down-convolution and up-convolution in the noise estimation backbone for the diffusion process. To address these issues, we propose an architecture that utilizes a fixed-size, reusable transformer block as a core structure, making it more suitable for hardware implementation. Our architecture is characterized by low complexity, token-free design, absence of positional embeddings, uniformity, and scalability, making it highly suitable for deployment on mobile and resource-constrained devices. The proposed model exhibit competitive and consistent performance across both unconditional and conditional image generation tasks. The model achieved a state-of-the-art FID score of 1.6 on unconditional image generation with the CelebA.