SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers
By Enze Xie, Junsong Chen, Junyu Chen, Han Cai, Haotian Tang, Yujun Lin, Zhekai Zhang, Muyang Li, Ligeng Zhu, Yao Lu and 1 more. arXiv.org, 2024
334 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We introduce Sana, a text-to-image framework that can efficiently generate images up to 4096$\times$4096 resolution. Sana can synthesize high-resolution, high-quality images with strong text-image alignment at a remarkably fast speed, deployable on laptop GPU. Core designs include: (1) Deep compression autoencoder: unlike traditional AEs, which compress images only 8$\times$, we trained an AE that can compress images 32$\times$, effectively reducing the number of latent tokens. (2) Linear DiT: we replace all vanilla attention in DiT with linear attention, which is more efficient at high resolutions without sacrificing quality. (3) Decoder-only text encoder: we replaced T5 with modern decoder-only small LLM as the text encoder and designed complex human instruction with in-context learning to enhance the image-text alignment. (4) Efficient training and sampling: we propose Flow-DPM-Solver to reduce sampling steps, with efficient caption labeling and selection to accelerate convergence. As a result, Sana-0.6B is very competitive with modern giant diffusion model (e.g. Flux-12B), being 20 times smaller and 100+ times faster in measured throughput. Moreover, Sana-0.6B can be deployed on a 16GB laptop GPU, taking less than 1 second to generate a 1024$\times$1024 resolution image. Sana enables content creation at low cost. Code and model will be publicly released.
Subfields: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Signal Processing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0f9315d8175b76097eadff3a2686ef203e6ee6b
Citations in the corpus
- Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models (2025, neutral): “…by Stable Diffusion 3 [8], which shows that higher-dimensional tokenizers can achieve stronger generation performance with a significantly larger model ca-pacity—however, this approach requires significantly more training compute, making it prohibitively expensive for most practical applications.”