Score-based generative models (SGMs) have recently emerged as a promising class of generative models. However, a fundamental limitation is that their sampling process is slow due to a need for many (e.g., 2000) iterations of sequential computations. An intuitive acceleration method is to reduce the sampling iterations which however causes severe performance degradation. We assault this problem to the ill-conditioned issues of the Langevin dynamics and reverse diffusion in the sampling process. Under this insight, we propose a novel preconditioned diffusion sampling (PDS) method that leverages matrix preconditioning to alleviate the aforementioned problem. PDS alters the sampling process of a vanilla SGM at marginal extra computation cost and without model retraining. Theoretically, we prove that PDS preserves the output distribution of the SGM, with no risk of inducing systematical bias to the original sampling process. We further theoretically reveal a relation between the parameter of PDS and the sampling iterations, easing the parameter estimation under varying sampling iterations. Extensive experiments on various image datasets with a variety of resolutions and diversity validate that our PDS consistently accelerates off-the-shelf SGMs whilst maintaining the synthesis quality. In particular, PDS can accelerate by up to \(28\times \) on more challenging high-resolution (1024 \(\times \) 1024) image generation. Compared with the latest generative models (e.g., CLD-SGM, DDIM, and Analytic-DDIM), PDS can achieve the best sampling quality on CIFAR-10 at an FID score of 1.99. Our code is publicly available to foster any further research https://github.com/fudan-zvg/PDS.
