arXiv AI

Rethinking What to Cache in Few-Step Diffusion Transformers: Solver-Aware Target Selection

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Optimizers for Diffusion Models: A Controlled Benchmark

The paper introduces the first controlled benchmark for optimizers in discrete diffusion models, evaluating seven optimizers (AdamW, Lion, Muon, SOAP, MARS, MARS‑M, Schedule‑Free) across four diffusion formulations: masked diffusion on text8, uniform diffusion on QM9 and LM1B, and Gaussian diffusion on CelebA‑64. Each optimizer undergoes the same search protocol and is retrained with full budget and multiple seeds, revealing that AdamW, while strong, is not universally optimal and that optimizers validated on autoregressive language models (Muon, MARS‑M, SOAP) can outperform tuned AdamW on certain tasks.

By Arman Bolatov, Egor Shulgin, David Li, Abduragim Shtanchaev, Sebastian U. Stich, Maxim Panov, Eric Moulines, Peter Richt\'arik, Martin Tak\'a\v{c}