Which Tokens to Merge? Diffusion Dynamics for Efficient Image Generation
Token merging has emerged as an effective training-free strategy for accelerating diffusion models by reducing redundant token computation while minimizing generation degradation. A key challenge is determining which tokens can be safely merged and which should be preserved for subsequent computation. Existing method addresses this by preserving prompt-aligned foreground regions, thereby protecting semantically relevant structures. However, this text-relevance criterion overlooks background objects, local details that are not explicitly mentioned in the prompt, leading to degraded structural coherence. In this work, we propose Dynamics-aware Token Merging (DaTMe), a training-free framework that grounds token merging in the underlying diffusion dynamics. Our key insight is that token importance should reflect whether a token remains unresolved during denoising and whether it carries structural information. To this end, DaTMe constructs a dynamics- aware importance map from the Tweedie denoised estimate. The map combines a temporal signal, measuring inter-step changes in the predicted clean image, with a structural signal, capturing local high-frequency content such as boundaries…