In plain words: Instead of training a teacher model and copying it into a one-step generator, a small network directly measures how the generator's outputs differ from real images to supply the training signal. This cut the usual error and made one-step images better than most teacher-based training.
Abstract · DiffRatio: Training One-Step Diffusion Models Without Teacher Supervision
Score-based distillation methods (e.g., variational score distillation) train one-step diffusion models by first pre-training a teacher score model and then distilling it into a one-step student model. However, the gradient estimator in the distillation stage usually suffers from two sources of bias: (1) biased teacher supervision due to score estimation error incurred during pre-training, and (2) the student model's score estimation error during distillation. These biases can degrade the quality of the resulting one-step diffusion model. To address this, we propose DiffRatio, a new framework for training one-step diffusion models: instead of estimating the teacher and student scores independently and then taking their difference, we directly estimate the score difference as the gradient of a learned log density ratio between the student and data distributions across diffusion time steps. This approach greatly simplifies the training pipeline, significantly reduces gradient estimation bias, and improves one-step generation quality. Additionally, it also reduces auxiliary network size by using a lightweight density-ratio network instead of two full score networks, which improves computational and memory efficiency. DiffRatio achieves competitive one-step generation results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet (64x64 and 512x512), outperforming most teacher-supervised distillation methods. Moreover, the learned density ratio naturally serves as a verifier, enabling a principled inference-time parallel scaling scheme that further improves the generation quality without external rewards or additional sequential computation.
Wenlin Chen, Mingtian Zhang, Jiajun He, Zijing Ou, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato, Bernhard Schölkopf, David Barber
arXiv:2502.08005 · cs.LG, cs.CV · submitted Feb 11, 2025 · updated Jan 28, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 22 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables, 2 algorithms