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Computation-Aware ControlNet with Dynamic Router for Text-to-Image Generation (arxiv.org)
3 points by jinqueeny on Mar 7, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of hand-picking which parts of an image generator get extra guidance, a learned switch turns control blocks on or off at each step, keeping only the ones that help. It matched or improved image quality while using less computing than the usual control-guided versions.

Abstract · FlexControl: Computation-Aware ControlNet with Differentiable Router for Text-to-Image Generation

ControlNet offers a powerful way to guide diffusion-based generative models, yet most implementations rely on ad-hoc heuristics to choose which network blocks to control-an approach that varies unpredictably with different tasks. To address this gap, we propose FlexControl, a novel framework that copies all diffusion blocks during training and employs a trainable gating mechanism to dynamically select which blocks to activate at each denoising step. With introducing a computation-aware loss, we can encourage control blocks only to activate when it benefit the generation quality. By eliminating manual block selection, FlexControl enhances adaptability across diverse tasks and streamlines the design pipeline, with computation-aware training loss in an end-to-end training manner. Through comprehensive experiments on both UNet (e.g., SD1.5) and DiT (e.g., SD3.0), we show that our method outperforms existing ControlNet variants in certain key aspects of interest. As evidenced by both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, FlexControl preserves or enhances image fidelity while also reducing computational overhead by selectively activating the most relevant blocks. These results underscore the potential of a flexible, data-driven approach for controlled diffusion and open new avenues for efficient generative model design. The code will soon be available at https://github.com/Anonymousuuser/FlexControl.

Zheng Fang, Lichuan Xiang, Xu Cai, Kaicheng Zhou, Hongkai Wen
arXiv:2502.10451 · cs.LG, cs.GR · submitted Feb 11, 2025 · updated Feb 20, 2025
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