English

FlashOmni: A Unified Sparse Attention Engine for Diffusion Transformers

Machine Learning 2025-10-01 v1 Artificial Intelligence Performance

Abstract

Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in visual synthesis, yet their deployment remains constrained by substantial computational demands. To alleviate this bottleneck, many sparsity-based acceleration methods have been proposed. However, their diverse sparsity patterns often require customized kernels for high-performance inference, limiting universality. We propose FlashOmni, a unified sparse attention engine compatible with arbitrary DiT architectures. FlashOmni introduces flexible sparse symbols to standardize the representation of a wide range of sparsity strategies, such as feature caching and block-sparse skipping. This unified abstraction enables the execution of diverse sparse computations within a single attention kernel. In addition, FlashOmni designs optimized sparse GEMMs for attention blocks, leveraging sparse symbols to eliminate redundant computations and further improve efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that FlashOmni delivers near-linear, closely matching the sparsity ratio speedup (1:1) in attention and GEMM-QQ, and achieves 2.5×\times-3.8×\times acceleration in GEMM-OO (max peaking at about 87.5% of the theoretical limit). Applied with a multi-granularity sparsity strategy, it enables the Hunyuan model (33K) to achieve about 1.5×\times end-to-end acceleration without degrading visual quality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.25401,
  title  = {FlashOmni: A Unified Sparse Attention Engine for Diffusion Transformers},
  author = {Liang Qiao and Yue Dai and Yeqi Huang and Hongyu Kan and Jun Shi and Hong An},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.25401},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:06:02.151Z