LaMamba-Diff: Linear-Time High-Fidelity Diffusion Models Based on Local Attention and Mamba


Yunxiang Fu (University of Hong Kong), Chaoqi Chen (Shenzhen University), Yizhou Yu (The University of Hong Kong)
The 35th British Machine Vision Conference
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Abstract

Recent Transformer-based diffusion models have shown remarkable performance, largely attributed to the ability of the self-attention mechanism to accurately capture both global and local contexts by computing all-pair interactions among input tokens. However, their quadratic complexity poses significant computational challenges for long-sequence inputs. Conversely, a recent state space model called Mamba offers linear complexity by compressing a filtered global context into a hidden state. Despite its efficiency, compression inevitably leads to information loss of fine-grained local dependencies among tokens, which are crucial for effective visual generative modeling. Motivated by these observations, we introduce Local Attentional Mamba (LaMamba) blocks that combine the strengths of self-attention and Mamba, capturing both global contexts and local details with linear complexity. Leveraging the efficient U-Net architecture, our model exhibits exceptional scalability and surpasses the performance of DiT across various model scales on ImageNet at 256x256 resolution, all while utilizing substantially fewer GFLOPs and a comparable number of parameters. Compared to state-of-the-art diffusion models on ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512, our largest model presents notable advantages, such as a reduction of up to 62% GFLOPs compared to DiT-XL/2, while achieving superior performance with comparable or fewer parameters.

Citation

@inproceedings{Fu_2025_BMVC,
author    = {Yunxiang Fu and Chaoqi Chen and Yizhou Yu},
title     = {LaMamba-Diff: Linear-Time High-Fidelity Diffusion Models Based on Local Attention and Mamba},
booktitle = {36th British Machine Vision Conference 2025, {BMVC} 2025, Sheffield, UK, November 24-27, 2025},
publisher = {BMVA},
year      = {2025},
url       = {https://bmva-archive.org.uk/bmvc/2025/assets/papers/Paper_962/paper.pdf}
}


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