Sink-Sparse Hybrid Attention for Efficient Inference in T2I/T2V Diffusion Transformers

Bingxin Xing, Yu Zhang, Jiatong Ding, Lei Lu, Ping Wang

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become a common backbone for high-quality text-to-image and text-to-video generation, but repeated dense self-attention remains a major inference bottleneck as token sequences grow and the same operator is invoked across many denoising steps. Our study suggests that dense attention in pretrained DiTs contains reusable layer/head-specific high-mass structure that can be identified from a small offline calibration set and reused across future generations. This leads to Sink-Sparse Hybrid Attention, a train-free attention replacement that reuses static sink masks and supplements them with a lightweight pooled-KV branch, while leaving model weights and sampling schedules unchanged. On Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B, the method attains 1.54$\times$ end-to-end speedup while maintaining generation quality. On Z-Image-Turbo, it attains 1.57$\times$ end-to-end speedup with competitive GenEval2 performance. These results indicate that reusable importance-aware sparse support can provide an effective train-free acceleration path for both T2V and T2I DiTs.