# Token merging
[Token merging](https://huggingface.co/papers/2303.17604) (ToMe) merges redundant tokens/patches progressively in the forward pass of a Transformer-based network which can speed-up the inference latency of [`StableDiffusionPipeline`].
Install ToMe from `pip`:
```bash
pip install tomesd
```
You can use ToMe from the [`tomesd`](https://github.com/dbolya/tomesd) library with the [`apply_patch`](https://github.com/dbolya/tomesd?tab=readme-ov-file#usage) function:
```diff
from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline
import torch
import tomesd
pipeline = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(
"runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5", torch_dtype=torch.float16, use_safetensors=True,
).to("cuda")
+ tomesd.apply_patch(pipeline, ratio=0.5)
image = pipeline("a photo of an astronaut riding a horse on mars").images[0]
```
The `apply_patch` function exposes a number of [arguments](https://github.com/dbolya/tomesd#usage) to help strike a balance between pipeline inference speed and the quality of the generated tokens. The most important argument is `ratio` which controls the number of tokens that are merged during the forward pass.
As reported in the [paper](https://huggingface.co/papers/2303.17604), ToMe can greatly preserve the quality of the generated images while boosting inference speed. By increasing the `ratio`, you can speed-up inference even further, but at the cost of some degraded image quality.
To test the quality of the generated images, we sampled a few prompts from [Parti Prompts](https://parti.research.google/) and performed inference with the [`StableDiffusionPipeline`] with the following settings:
We didn’t notice any significant decrease in the quality of the generated samples, and you can check out the generated samples in this [WandB report](https://wandb.ai/sayakpaul/tomesd-results/runs/23j4bj3i?workspace=). If you're interested in reproducing this experiment, use this [script](https://gist.github.com/sayakpaul/8cac98d7f22399085a060992f411ecbd).
## Benchmarks
We also benchmarked the impact of `tomesd` on the [`StableDiffusionPipeline`] with [xFormers](https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/optimization/xformers) enabled across several image resolutions. The results are obtained from A100 and V100 GPUs in the following development environment:
```bash
- `diffusers` version: 0.15.1
- Python version: 3.8.16
- PyTorch version (GPU?): 1.13.1+cu116 (True)
- Huggingface_hub version: 0.13.2
- Transformers version: 4.27.2
- Accelerate version: 0.18.0
- xFormers version: 0.0.16
- tomesd version: 0.1.2
```
To reproduce this benchmark, feel free to use this [script](https://gist.github.com/sayakpaul/27aec6bca7eb7b0e0aa4112205850335). The results are reported in seconds, and where applicable we report the speed-up percentage over the vanilla pipeline when using ToMe and ToMe + xFormers.
| **GPU** | **Resolution** | **Batch size** | **Vanilla** | **ToMe** | **ToMe + xFormers** |
|----------|----------------|----------------|-------------|----------------|---------------------|
| **A100** | 512 | 10 | 6.88 | 5.26 (+23.55%) | 4.69 (+31.83%) |
| | 768 | 10 | OOM | 14.71 | 11 |
| | | 8 | OOM | 11.56 | 8.84 |
| | | 4 | OOM | 5.98 | 4.66 |
| | | 2 | 4.99 | 3.24 (+35.07%) | 2.1 (+37.88%) |
| | | 1 | 3.29 | 2.24 (+31.91%) | 2.03 (+38.3%) |
| | 1024 | 10 | OOM | OOM | OOM |
| | | 8 | OOM | OOM | OOM |
| | | 4 | OOM | 12.51 | 9.09 |
| | | 2 | OOM | 6.52 | 4.96 |
| | | 1 | 6.4 | 3.61 (+43.59%) | 2.81 (+56.09%) |
| **V100** | 512 | 10 | OOM | 10.03 | 9.29 |
| | | 8 | OOM | 8.05 | 7.47 |
| | | 4 | 5.7 | 4.3 (+24.56%) | 3.98 (+30.18%) |
| | | 2 | 3.14 | 2.43 (+22.61%) | 2.27 (+27.71%) |
| | | 1 | 1.88 | 1.57 (+16.49%) | 1.57 (+16.49%) |
| | 768 | 10 | OOM | OOM | 23.67 |
| | | 8 | OOM | OOM | 18.81 |
| | | 4 | OOM | 11.81 | 9.7 |
| | | 2 | OOM | 6.27 | 5.2 |
| | | 1 | 5.43 | 3.38 (+37.75%) | 2.82 (+48.07%) |
| | 1024 | 10 | OOM | OOM | OOM |
| | | 8 | OOM | OOM | OOM |
| | | 4 | OOM | OOM | 19.35 |
| | | 2 | OOM | 13 | 10.78 |
| | | 1 | OOM | 6.66 | 5.54 |
As seen in the tables above, the speed-up from `tomesd` becomes more pronounced for larger image resolutions. It is also interesting to note that with `tomesd`, it is possible to run the pipeline on a higher resolution like 1024x1024. You may be able to speed-up inference even more with [`torch.compile`](torch2.0).