Despite advances in diffusion-based text-to-music (TTM) methods, efficient, high-quality generation remains a challenge. We introduce Presto!, an approach to inference acceleration for score-based diffusion transformers via reducing both sampling steps and cost per step. To reduce steps, we develop a new score-based distribution matching distillation (DMD) method for the EDM-family of diffusion models, the first GAN-based distillation method for TTM. To reduce the cost per step, we develop a simple, but powerful improvement to a recent layer distillation method that improves learning via preserving hidden state variance. Finally, we combine our improved step and layer distillation methods together for a dual-faceted approach. We evaluate our step and layer distillation methods independently and show each yield best-in-class performance. Furthermore, we find our combined distillation method can generate high-quality outputs with improved diversity accelerating our base model by 10-18x (32 second output in 230ms, 15x faster than the comparable SOTA model) -- the fastest high-quality TTM model to our knowledge.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)
Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation
Zachary Novack, Ge Zhu, Jonah Casebeer, Julian McAuley, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Nicholas J. Bryan
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