Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion (SD) [[Paper]](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.10752v2.pdf) is a powerful generative model that can produce high-quality images based on textual descriptions. By decomposing the image formation process into a sequential application of denoising autoencoders, diffusion models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art synthesis results on image data and beyond. However, due to their direct operation in pixel space, optimization of powerful DMs is computationally expensive and can consume hundreds of GPU days. To address this challenge, the SD model is applied in the latent space of powerful pretrained autoencoders. This enables DM training on limited computational resources while retaining their quality and flexibility, greatly boosting visual fidelity.
The SD model also introduces cross-attention layers into the model architecture, allowing it to turn diffusion models into powerful and flexible generators for general conditioning inputs such as text or bounding boxes. As a result, the SD model achieves a new state of the art for image inpainting and highly competitive performance on various tasks, including unconditional image generation, semantic scene synthesis, and super-resolution. Additionally, the SD model significantly reduces computational requirements compared to pixel-based DMs, making it an attractive solution for a wide range of applications.
Feature |
Training |
Inference |
|---|---|---|
Data parallelism |
Yes |
N/A |
Tensor parallelism |
No |
No |
Pipeline parallelism |
No |
No |
Sequence parallelism |
No |
No |
Activation checkpointing |
No |
No |
FP32/TF32 |
Yes |
Yes (FP16 enabled by default) |
AMP/FP16 |
Yes |
Yes |
AMP/BF16 |
No |
No |
BF16 O2 |
No |
No |
TransformerEngine/FP8 |
No |
No |
Multi-GPU |
Yes |
Yes |
Multi-Node |
Yes |
Yes |
Inference deployment |
N/A |
|
SW stack support |
Slurm DeepOps/Base Command Manager/Base Command Platform |
Slurm DeepOps/Base Command Manager/Base Command Platform |
NVfuser |
No |
N/A |
Distributed Optimizer |
No |
N/A |
TorchInductor |
Yes |
N/A |
Flash Attention |
Yes |
N/A |
NHWC GroupNorm |
Yes |
Yes |