Pipeline callbacks

The denoising loop of a pipeline can be modified with custom defined functions using the callback_on_step_end parameter. This can be really useful for dynamically adjusting certain pipeline attributes, or modifying tensor variables. The flexibility of callbacks opens up some interesting use-cases such as changing the prompt embeddings at each timestep, assigning different weights to the prompt embeddings, and editing the guidance scale.

This guide will show you how to use the callback_on_step_end parameter to disable classifier-free guidance (CFG) after 40% of the inference steps to save compute with minimal cost to performance.

The callback function should have the following arguments:

Your callback function should look something like this:

def callback_dynamic_cfg(pipe, step_index, timestep, callback_kwargs):
        # adjust the batch_size of prompt_embeds according to guidance_scale
        if step_index == int(pipe.num_timestep * 0.4):
                prompt_embeds = callback_kwargs["prompt_embeds"]
                prompt_embeds = prompt_embeds.chunk(2)[-1]

        # update guidance_scale and prompt_embeds
        pipe._guidance_scale = 0.0
        callback_kwargs["prompt_embeds"] = prompt_embeds
        return callback_kwargs

Now, you can pass the callback function to the callback_on_step_end parameter and the prompt_embeds to callback_on_step_end_tensor_inputs.

import torch
from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline

pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5", torch_dtype=torch.float16)
pipe = pipe.to("cuda")

prompt = "a photo of an astronaut riding a horse on mars"

generator = torch.Generator(device="cuda").manual_seed(1)
out = pipe(prompt, generator=generator, callback_on_step_end=callback_custom_cfg, callback_on_step_end_tensor_inputs=['prompt_embeds'])

out.images[0].save("out_custom_cfg.png")

The callback function is executed at the end of each denoising step, and modifies the pipeline attributes and tensor variables for the next denoising step.

With callbacks, you can implement features such as dynamic CFG without having to modify the underlying code at all!

🤗 Diffusers currently only supports callback_on_step_end, but feel free to open a feature request if you have a cool use-case and require a callback function with a different execution point!