Alibaba's CDM slashes diffusion steps to 4 without losing detail
Alibaba just introduced Continuous-Time Distribution Matching (CDM), a distillation technique that accelerates image diffusion models down to 4 sampling steps. Unlike predecessors like DMD2 that often produce waxy, over-smoothed results, CDM preserves fine details without complex auxiliary reward models. It brings near real-time, high-fidelity generation to standard GPUs.