Token Pruning for In-Context Generation in Diffusion Transformers

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Authors: Junqing Lin, Xingyu Zheng, Pei Cheng, Bin Fu, Jingwei Sun, Guangzhong Sun
Cited by: 0

Abstract

In-context generation significantly enhances Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) by enabling controllable image-to-image generation through reference examples. However, the resulting input concatenation drastically increases sequence length, creating a substantial computational bottleneck. Existing token reduction techniques, primarily tailored for text-to-image synthesis, fall short in this paradigm as they apply uniform reduction strategies, overlooking the inherent role asymmetry between reference contexts and target latents across spatial, temporal, and functional dimensions. To bridge this gap, we introduce ToPi, a training-free token pruning framework tailored for in-context generation in DiTs. Specifically, ToPi utilizes offline calibration-driven sensitivity analysis to identify pivotal attention layers, serving as a robust proxy for redundancy estimation. Leveraging these layers, we derive a novel influence metric to quantify the contribution of each context token for selective pruning, coupled with a temporal update strategy that adapts to the evolving diffusion trajectory. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that ToPi can achieve over 30\% speedup in inference while maintaining structural fidelity and visual consistency across complex image generation tasks.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis Advanced Neural Network Applications Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
2 February 2026
Document type
Preprint