Consistency Distillation

Key Insight

A 50-step Stable Diffusion model is accurate but slow; consistency distillation trains a consistency model student that reaches a comparable image in just 4 steps by learning to jump straight to the denoising trajectory's endpoint instead of crawling along it. The practical, latent-space version is the LCM, which is what makes near-interactive image generation possible. The headline lesson is that distillation moves cost from inference to training — you pay once to train the student so every future image is ~10× cheaper, accepting a modest quality dip in return.