UltraDiff: Transferring High-Fidelity Priors to Compressed Latent Spaces for High-Resolution Image Generation

Abstract

High-resolution synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) faces a fundamental trade-off between computational cost and generative fidelity. This trade off is largely governed by the latent compression factor f (e.g. f8 denotes f=8 and f32 f=32). While aggressive compression (f32) significantly improves efficiency, it suffers from severe information loss and ambiguity compared to standard f8 models. We propose UltraDiff, a framework that reformulates this challenge as joint latent diffusion learning followed by marginal score distillation. We introduce MixTeacher, a dual branch DiT that models the joint f8-f32 distribution, utilizing shared attention to resolve the ambiguity of the compressed space with high fidelity f8 priors. Crucially, we propose vector field distillation in the native f32 space. Theoretically, this compels the student to learn the conditional expectation of the teacher trajectory, effectively filtering out compression artifacts. Across the evaluated 1K to 4K settings, UltraDiff approaches f8 level quality while preserving f32 efficiency. With 20 sampling steps on a single A100 GPU, it generates a 2K image in 6.2 seconds over 40 times faster than our f8 baseline.