Reviving ConvNeXt for Efficient Convolutional Diffusion Models

Researchers introduce FCDM, a fully convolutional diffusion model based on ConvNeXt architecture that achieves competitive performance with DiT-XL/2 using only 50% of the computational resources. The model demonstrates exceptional training efficiency, requiring 7x fewer training steps and can be trained on just 4 GPUs, reviving convolutional networks as an efficient alternative to Transformer-based diffusion models.