UniCon: Unidirectional Information Flow for Effective Control of Large-Scale Diffusion Models

We introduce UniCon, a novel architecture designed to enhance control and efficiency in training adapters for large-scale diffusion models like the Diffusion Transformer. Unlike existing methods that rely on bidirectional interaction between the diffusion model and control adapter, UniCon implements a unidirectional flow from the diffusion network to the adapter, allowing the adapter alone to generate the final output. UniCon reduces computational demands by eliminating the need for the diffusion model to compute and store gradients during adapter training. UniCon is free from the constraints of encoder-focused designs and is able to utilize all parameters of the diffusion model, making it highly effective for transformer-based architectures. Our results indicate that UniCon reduces GPU memory usage by one-third and increases training speed by 2.3 times, while maintaining the same adapter parameter size. Additionally, without requiring extra computational resources, UniCon enables the training of adapters with double the parameter volume of existing ControlNets. In a series of image condition generation tasks, UniCon has demonstrated precise response to control information and excellent generation capabilities.

[Paper]