Toward Theoretical Insights into Diffusion Trajectory Distillation via Operator Merging

Abstract

Diffusion trajectory distillation accelerates sampling by training a student model to approximate the multi-step denoising trajectories of a pretrained teacher model using far fewer steps. Despite strong empirical results, the trade-off between distillation strategy and generative quality remains poorly understood. We provide a theoretical characterization by reinterpreting trajectory distillation as an operator merging problem, differentiating our analysis between two distinct regimes. In the linear Gaussian regime, where approximation error is zero, we isolate optimization error, specifically signal shrinkage driven by finite training time, as the primary bottleneck. This characterization allows us to derive the theoretically optimal merging strategy, which exhibits a variance-driven phase transition and is computable via a Pareto dynamic programming algorithm. In the nonlinear Gaussian mixture regime, we prove that distilling composite steps incurs unavoidable approximation error due to the exponential growth of mixture components, and we quantify how these errors amplify across merges. Together, these results clarify the distinct theoretical mechanisms governing each regime and provide principled guidance for method selection.