SpecDiff: Accelerating Diffusion Model Inference with Self-Speculation

Feature caching has recently emerged as a promising method for diffusion model acceleration. It effectively alleviates the inefficiency problem caused by high computational requirements by caching similar features in the inference process of the diffusion model. In this paper, we analyze existing feature caching methods from the perspective of information utilization, and point out that relying solely on historical information will lead to constrained accuracy and speed performance. And we propose a novel paradigm that introduces future information via self-speculation based on the information similarity at the same time step across different iteration times. Based on this paradigm, we present \textit{SpecDiff}, a training-free multi-level feature caching strategy including a cached feature selection algorithm and a multi-level feature classification algorithm. (1) Feature selection algorithm based on self-speculative information. \textit{SpecDiff} determines a dynamic importance score for each token based on self-speculative information and historical information, and performs cached feature selection through the importance score. (2) Multi-level feature classification algorithm based on feature importance scores. \textit{SpecDiff} classifies tokens by leveraging the differences in feature importance scores and introduces a multi-level feature calculation strategy. Extensive experiments show that \textit{SpecDiff} achieves average 2.80 \times, 2.74 \times , and 3.17\times speedup with negligible quality loss in Stable Diffusion 3, 3.5, and FLUX compared to RFlow on NVIDIA A800-80GB GPU. By merging speculative and historical information, \textit{SpecDiff} overcomes the speedup-accuracy trade-off bottleneck, pushing the Pareto frontier of speedup and accuracy in the efficient diffusion model inference.