DiCo: Revitalizing ConvNets for Scalable and Efficient Diffusion Modeling

Diffusion Transformer (DiT), a promising diffusion model for visual generation, demonstrates impressive performance but incurs significant computational overhead. Intriguingly, analysis of pre-trained DiT models reveals that global self-attention is often redundant, predominantly capturing local patterns-highlighting the potential for more efficient alternatives. In this paper, we revisit convolution as an alternative building block for constructing efficient and expressive diffusion models. However, naively replacing self-attention with convolution typically results in degraded performance. Our investigations attribute this performance gap to the higher channel redundancy in ConvNets compared to Transformers. To resolve this, we introduce a compact channel attention mechanism that promotes the activation of more diverse channels, thereby enhancing feature diversity. This leads to Diffusion ConvNet (DiCo), a family of diffusion models built entirely from standard ConvNet modules, offering strong generative performance with significant efficiency gains. On class-conditional ImageNet benchmarks, DiCo outperforms previous diffusion models in both image quality and generation speed. Notably, DiCo-XL achieves an FID of 2.05 at 256x256 resolution and 2.53 at 512x512, with a 2.7x and 3.1x speedup over DiT-XL/2, respectively. Furthermore, our largest model, DiCo-H, scaled to 1B parameters, reaches an FID of 1.90 on ImageNet 256x256-without any additional supervision during training.