A First-Step Bias Restores Lost Diversity in Diffusion Model Distillation

Wenwu Tang, Dong Wang, Yun Cheng, Olga Saukh

Distribution-matching distillation enables high-quality image generation in only a few denoising steps. However, distilled student models often map different initial noise samples to similar outputs under the same prompt. To locate where diversity is lost, we compare the teacher and student along the sampling trajectory. The largest measured reduction in the response to different initial noises occurs during the first, high-noise step. When we replace the first step with the teacher's corresponding trajectory and leave the final three student steps unchanged, most of the output diversity returns. This suggests that the first step is a key point for restoring diversity. Motivated by this finding, we introduce \emph{ReSeed}, a post-distillation method that adds a seed-response bias adapter only to the first student step and aligns its velocity with the teacher's first-interval secant velocity. All student weights and later denoising steps remain unchanged. We evaluate ReSeed on three text-to-image models (SD3-Medium, SD3.5-Medium, and FLUX.1-dev) and one text-to-video model (Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B). For a distilled 4-step FLUX.1-dev model, \emph{ReSeed} requires only $0.00196\%$…