FDHA: Fusion-Driven Heterogeneous Accelerator for Efficient Diffusion Model Inference
摘要
Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generative AI tasks. While prior research primarily focuses on eliminating redundancy across timesteps, models like Stable Diffusion introduce a ResNet-Transformer Alternating Execution (RTAE) Pattern, where convolution and attention operators execute sequentially within each timestep. This execution pattern leads to excessive on-chip memory access and poor computational resource utilization due to the mismatched characteristics of convolution and Transformer operations. To tackle these challenges, we propose FDHA, an accelerator designed for efficient diffusion model inference. First, to mitigate redundant on-chip memory access, FDHA introduces an inter-operator dataflow fusion mechanism that strategically aligns ResNet’s convolution and Transformer’s matrix multiplication dimensions, enabling efficient kernel reuse. Second, to maximize computational resource utilization, FDHA employs a heterogeneous architecture with dedicated Processing Elements for convolutions and Tensor Processing Elements for matrix multiplications, allowing for pipelined execution. Experimental results demonstrate that FDHA achieves 3.28 \(\times \) speedup over an NVIDIA A100 GPU and 2.62 \(\times \) speedup over a SoTA diffusion accelerator.