DDT: Decoupled Diffusion Transformer
Introduction
We decouple diffusion transformer into encoder-decoder design, and surprisingly that a more substantial encoder yields performance improvements as model size increases.

- We achieves 1.26 FID on ImageNet256x256 Benchmark with DDT-XL/2(22en6de).
- We achieves 1.28 FID on ImageNet512x512 Benchmark with DDT-XL/2(22en6de).
- As a byproduct, our DDT can reuse encoder among adjacent steps to accelerate inference.
Visualizations
Checkpoints
We take the off-shelf VAE to encode image into latent space, and train the decoder with DDT.
| Dataset | Model | Params | FID | HuggingFace |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ImageNet256 | DDT-XL/2(22en6de) | 675M | 1.26 | 🤗 |
| ImageNet512 | DDT-XL/2(22en6de) | 675M | 1.28 | 🤗 |
Online Demos
We provide online demos for DDT-XL/2(22en6de) on HuggingFace Spaces.
HF spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/MCG-NJU/DDT
To host the local gradio demo(default 512 resolution), run the following command:
# default 512 resolution python app.py --config configs/repa_improved_ddt_xlen22de6_512.yaml --resolution 512 --ckpt_path=XXX512.ckpt # for 256 resolution python app.py --config configs/repa_improved_ddt_xlen22de6_256.yaml --resolution 256 --ckpt_path=XXX256.ckpt
Usages
We use ADM evaluation suite to report FID.
# for installation
pip install -r requirements.txtBy default, the main.py will use all available GPUs. You can specify the GPU(s) to use with CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES.
or specify the number of GPUs to use with as :
# in configs/repa_improved_ddt_xlen22de6_256.yaml trainer: default_root_dir: universal_flow_workdirs accelerator: auto strategy: auto devices: auto # devices: 0, # devices: 0,1 num_nodes: 1
By default, the save_image_callbacks will only save the first 100 images and npz file(to calculate FID with ADM suite). You can change the number of images to save with as :
# in configs/repa_improved_ddt_xlen22de6_256.yaml callbacks: - class_path: src.callbacks.model_checkpoint.CheckpointHook init_args: every_n_train_steps: 10000 save_top_k: -1 save_last: true - class_path: src.callbacks.save_images.SaveImagesHook init_args: save_dir: val max_save_num: 0 # max_save_num: 100
By default, we infer 50K images with batch size 64. You can change the number of images and classes to infer with as :
# in configs/repa_improved_ddt_xlen22de6_256.yaml data: train_dataset: imagenet256 train_root: /mnt/bn/wangshuai6/data/ImageNet/train train_image_size: 256 train_batch_size: 16 eval_max_num_instances: 50000 pred_batch_size: 64 # pred_batch_size: 16 pred_num_workers: 4 pred_seeds: null # pred_seeds: 1,2,3,4 pred_selected_classes: null # pred_selected_classes: # - 0 # - 1 num_classes: 1000 latent_shape: - 4 - 32 - 32
pred_selected_classes is a list of class indices to infer, if pred_selected_classes is null, all classes will be inferred.
pred_seeds is string of seeds for every class seprated with , to infer
# for inference python main.py predict -c configs/repa_improved_ddt_xlen22de6_256.yaml --ckpt_path=XXX.ckpt # # or specify the GPU(s) to use with as : CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1, python main.py predict -c configs/repa_improved_ddt_xlen22de6_256.yaml --ckpt_path=XXX.ckpt
# for training # extract image latent (optional) python3 tools/cache_imlatent4.py # train python main.py fit -c configs/repa_improved_ddt_xlen22de6_256.yaml
Reference
@article{wang2025ddt, title={DDT: Decoupled Diffusion Transformer}, author={Wang, Shuai and Tian, Zhi and Huang, Weilin and Wang, Limin}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05741}, year={2025} }
Acknowledgement
The code is mainly built upon FlowDCN, we also borrow ideas from the REPA, MAR and SiT.
