Large Scale Diffusion Distillation via Score-Regularized Continuous-Time Consistency

Kaiwen Zheng, Yuji Wang, Qianli Ma, Huayu Chen, Jintao Zhang, Yogesh Balaji, Jianfei Chen, Ming-Yu Liu, Jun Zhu, Qinsheng Zhang

Keywords: Diffusion Models, Distillation, Consistency Models, Few-Step Generation, MeanFlow

TL;DR: We propose techniques to address issues of continuous-time consistency distillation and scale up to 14B video diffusion models for the first time.

Abstract: Although continuous-time consistency models (e.g., sCM, MeanFlow) are theoretically principled and empirically powerful for fast academic-scale diffusion, its applicability to large-scale text-to-image and video tasks remains unclear due to infrastructure challenges in Jacobian-vector product (JVP) computation and the limitations of evaluation benchmarks like FID. This work represents the first effort to scale up continuous-time consistency to general application-level image and video diffusion models, and to make JVP-based distillation effective at large scale. We first develop a parallelism-compatible FlashAttention-2 JVP kernel, enabling sCM training on models with over 10 billion parameters and high-dimensional video tasks. Our investigation reveals fundamental quality limitations of sCM in fine-detail generation, which we attribute to error accumulation and the “mode-covering” nature of its forward-divergence objective. To remedy this, we propose the score-regularized continuous-time consistency model (rCM), which incorporates score distillation as a long-skip regularizer. This integration complements sCM with the “mode-seeking” reverse divergence, effectively improving visual quality while maintaining high generation diversity. Validated on large-scale models (Cosmos-Predict2, Wan2.1) up to 14B parameters and 5-second videos, rCM generally matches the state-of-the-art distillation method DMD2 on quality metrics while mitigating mode collapse and offering notable advantages in diversity, all without GAN tuning or extensive hyperparameter searches. The distilled models generate high-fidelity samples in only $1\sim4$ steps, accelerating diffusion sampling by $15\times\sim50\times$. These results position rCM as a practical and theoretically grounded framework for advancing large-scale diffusion distillation. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/rcm.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 8226