arXiv subjects

Yixiang Cai

Publications and source records attributed to Yixiang Cai.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RoLA: Rotary-Positioned Low-Rank Linear Attention for Efficient Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve strong video generation quality, but their dense spatiotemporal self-attention scales quadratically with sequence length and quickly becomes the dominant inference bottleneck. Sparse low-rank hybrids alleviate this cost by combining a local sparse branch with a global compressed branch. In video DiTs equipped with 3D Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE), the global branch faces a structural compatibility issue: when RoPE is applied before a nonlinear feature map, the rotation and nonlinearity generally do not commute, making it difficult to keep a query-independent linear summary while preserving relative rotary geometry. Existing work often sidesteps this issue by replacing genuine cross-token global aggregation with coordinate-conditioned surrogates or learnable absolute positional modules. These compromises can be effective, but they approximate relative decay from absolute coordinates and introduce extra positional parameters. We propose \textbf{RoLA}, a rotary-positioned low-rank linear-attention branch that keeps genuine cross-token aggregation while remaining compatible with a reusable linear summary. The design applies RoPE \emph{outside} the nonlinear low-rank feature map and reuses a truncated subset of the pre-trained rotary schedule matched to the low-rank bottleneck. This yields a linear-time low-rank global branch with relative positional behavior by design and no additional positional parameters; the full sparse--low-rank module still includes the fixed-sparsity sparse branch. Experiments on open-source video DiTs show that the resulting method remains competitive in generation quality at 90\% sparsity while achieving 2.63$\times$ end-to-end inference speedup on Wan2.1-14B (720p, 81 frames, measured on an NVIDIA H100 GPU).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CrossDistill: Balancing Quality and Diversity via Trajectory-Level Hybrid Few-Step Distillation

Few-step distillation accelerates diffusion models but must balance diversity and fidelity: trajectory-based distillation preserves mode coverage, while distribution matching sharpens samples but can reduce diversity. We show that this tension can be exploited in a noise-regime-dependent way: high-noise steps largely determine global modes, whereas low-noise steps refine local details. We propose CrossDistill, a trajectory-level hybrid distillation framework that splits the sampling trajectory at a crossover point, applies a trajectory-preserving objective on the high-noise interval and a distribution-matching objective on the low-noise interval, and couples the two stages through the crossover state. In contrast to loss-level mixing, and complementarily to training-time two-stage recipes, CrossDistill explicitly assigns complementary objectives along the noise axis, so that global branching is preserved before local statistics are sharpened. CrossDistill is a noise-level scheduling policy: PCM and DMD are plug-in instantiations, while the noise partition, crossover coupling, and objective ordering are the key design elements. Experiments on text-to-video diffusion models and qualitative image-to-video results show that CrossDistill expands the few-step quality-diversity frontier, retaining seed-level variation while achieving competitive visual fidelity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SparkDiffusion: Mitigating the High-Sparsity Trap --- A Unified Framework for up to $265\times$ Single-GPU Acceleration of Visual Generation

Video diffusion transformers are expensive because attention dominates long spatiotemporal token sequences. We identify the \emph{high-sparsity trap}: at extreme attention sparsity, step-local training losses keep decreasing while terminal generation quality stagnates or degrades. The trap is one of supervision: the dominant terminal errors originate in the high-noise structure-generation stage, and terminal-aligned training corrects terminal errors that substantially extended step-local training cannot. This yields a simple staging principle: \emph{first adapt the sparse architecture into a coarse prior, then correct the terminal distribution}. We instantiate the principle as \method, a unified acceleration framework for visual generation that combines a short sparse warm-up, few-step trajectory-mixed distillation, and FP8 quantization with fused kernels. \method sustains $97\%$ attention sparsity with strong visual quality on long-sequence 720P generation across Wan2.1/Wan2.2 backbones and T2V/I2V tasks, and $90\%$ sparsity on Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B-480P. With 3-step CFG-free inference, \method achieves a $265\times$ end-to-end speedup over the 50-step CFG dense baseline for Wan2.1-T2V-14B-720P on a single RTX~5090 ($220\times$ on H100), and denoises a Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B-480P video in $1.3$s.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

RoPeSLR: 3D RoPE-driven Sparse-LowRank Attention for Efficient Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized high-fidelity video generation, yet their $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ attention complexity poses a formidable bottleneck for long-sequence synthesis. While recent sparse-linear attention hybrids aim to mitigate this, their performance severely degrades at extreme sparsity due to the "RoPE Dilemma": standard linear attention fails to preserve the orthogonal relative-position structure of 3D Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE), neutralizing vital distance awareness. To address this, we propose \textbf{RoPeSLR}, a 3D RoPE-guided Sparse-LowRank attention framework. We establish that under empirically validated assumptions, the DiT attention manifold admits a decoupling into a high-frequency semantic spike set (bounded by $\mathcal{O}(L^{3/2})$ sparsity) and an extreme low-rank ($\mathcal{O}(d_h \log L)$) background continuum. Guided by this structural prior, RoPeSLR eschews standard linear attention for a head-wise low-rank parameterization equipped with a learnable 3D Absolute Positional Embedding (PE) injection, seamlessly synthesizing long-range relative distance decay. By guaranteeing sub-quadratic sparsity and sub-linear rank growth, RoPeSLR is exceptionally suited for scaling to ultra-long video inference. Extensive evaluations validate this scalable superiority: at 90\% sparsity, RoPeSLR achieves up to $10\times$ fewer FLOPs on Wan2.1-1.3B and delivers a $2.26\times$ end-to-end inference speedup on the ultra-long 100K+ token sequences of HunyuanVideo-13B, all while maintaining near-lossless generation fidelity (less than 1.3\% average VBench degradation).

cs.CV↗