SparkDiffusion: Mitigating the High-Sparsity Trap --- A Unified Framework for up to $265\times$ Single-GPU Acceleration of Visual Generation
Abstract: Video diffusion transformers are expensive because attention dominates long spatiotemporal token sequences. We identify the \emph{high-sparsity trap}: at extreme attention sparsity, step-local training losses keep decreasing while terminal generation quality stagnates or degrades. The trap is one of supervision: the dominant terminal errors originate in the high-noise structure-generation stage, and terminal-aligned training corrects terminal errors that substantially extended step-local training cannot. This yields a simple staging principle: \emph{first adapt the sparse architecture into a coarse prior, then correct the terminal distribution}. We instantiate the principle as \method, a unified acceleration framework for visual generation that combines a short sparse warm-up, few-step trajectory-mixed distillation, and FP8 quantization with fused kernels. \method sustains $97\%$ attention sparsity with strong visual quality on long-sequence 720P generation across Wan2.1/Wan2.2 backbones and T2V/I2V tasks, and $90\%$ sparsity on Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B-480P. With 3-step CFG-free inference, \method achieves a $265\times$ end-to-end speedup over the 50-step CFG dense baseline for Wan2.1-T2V-14B-720P on a single RTX~5090 ($220\times$ on H100), and denoises a Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B-480P video in $1.3$s.