A new method from MIT’s CSAIL researchers is able to generate images at about 20 FPS on current-gen hardware.
AI image generators typically work through a process known as “diffusion”. Basically, the model that’s generating the image starts with a very vague, blurry picture, and successive sampling steps refine the image until it’s sharp and realistic—or at least, as real as the model can get for what you’ve prompted. Diffusion is usually a time-consuming process requiring lots of steps, but MIT researchers have found a better way.
Using a new approach called “distribution matching distillation”, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have managed to reduce the diffusion process down to a single sampling step. Obviously, this is much faster than having to iterate on the image thirty to fifty times as you usually do with typical image diffusion processes.
