FreqTS: Frequency-Aware Token Selection for Accelerating Diffusion Models

Abstract

Copyright \ua9 2025, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.In this paper, we propose FreqTS, a novel Frequency-Aware Token Selection approach for accelerating diffusion models without requiring retraining. Diffusion models have gained significant attention in the field of image synthesis due to their impressive generative capabilities. However, these models often suffer from high computational costs, primarily due to the sequential denoising process and large model size. Additionally, diffusion models tend to prioritize low-frequency features, leading to sub-optimal quantitative results. To address these challenges, FreqTS introduces an amplitude-based sorting method that separates Token features in the frequency domain of diffusion models into high-frequency and low-frequency subsets. It then utilizes fast Token Selection to reduce the presence of low-frequency features, effectively reducing the computational overhead. Moreover, FreqTS incorporates a Bayesian hyper-parameter search to dynamically assign different selection strategies for various denoising processes. Extensive experiments conducted on Stable Diffusion series models, PixArt-Alpha, LCM, and other models demonstrate that FreqTS achieves a minimum acceleration of 2.3 7 without the need for retraining. Furthermore, FreqTS showcases its versatility by being applicable to different sampling techniques and compatible with other dimension-specific acceleration algorithms