# Schedulers
Diffusion pipelines are inherently a collection of diffusion models and schedulers that are partly independent from each other. This means that one is able to switch out parts of the pipeline to better customize
a pipeline to one's use case. The best example of this are the [Schedulers](../api/schedulers.mdx).
Whereas diffusion models usually simply define the forward pass from noise to a less noisy sample,
schedulers define the whole denoising process, *i.e.*:
- How many denoising steps?
- Stochastic or deterministic?
- What algorithm to use to find the denoised sample
They can be quite complex and often define a trade-off between **denoising speed** and **denoising quality**.
It is extremely difficult to measure quantitatively which scheduler works best for a given diffusion pipeline, so it is often recommended to simply try out which works best.
The following paragraphs shows how to do so with the 🧨 Diffusers library.
## Load pipeline
Let's start by loading the stable diffusion pipeline.
Remember that you have to be a registered user on the 🤗 Hugging Face Hub, and have "click-accepted" the [license](https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5) in order to use stable diffusion.
```python
from huggingface_hub import login
from diffusers import DiffusionPipeline
import torch
# first we need to login with our access token
login()
# Now we can download the pipeline
pipeline = DiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5", torch_dtype=torch.float16)
```
Next, we move it to GPU:
```python
pipeline.to("cuda")
```
## Access the scheduler
The scheduler is always one of the components of the pipeline and is usually called `"scheduler"`.
So it can be accessed via the `"scheduler"` property.
```python
pipeline.scheduler
```
**Output**:
```
PNDMScheduler {
"_class_name": "PNDMScheduler",
"_diffusers_version": "0.8.0.dev0",
"beta_end": 0.012,
"beta_schedule": "scaled_linear",
"beta_start": 0.00085,
"clip_sample": false,
"num_train_timesteps": 1000,
"set_alpha_to_one": false,
"skip_prk_steps": true,
"steps_offset": 1,
"trained_betas": null
}
```
We can see that the scheduler is of type [`PNDMScheduler`].
Cool, now let's compare the scheduler in its performance to other schedulers.
First we define a prompt on which we will test all the different schedulers:
```python
prompt = "A photograph of an astronaut riding a horse on Mars, high resolution, high definition."
```
Next, we create a generator from a random seed that will ensure that we can generate similar images as well as run the pipeline:
```python
generator = torch.Generator(device="cuda").manual_seed(8)
image = pipeline(prompt, generator=generator).images[0]
image
```
## Changing the scheduler
Now we show how easy it is to change the scheduler of a pipeline. Every scheduler has a property [`SchedulerMixin.compatibles`]
which defines all compatible schedulers. You can take a look at all available, compatible schedulers for the Stable Diffusion pipeline as follows.
```python
pipeline.scheduler.compatibles
```
**Output**:
```
[diffusers.schedulers.scheduling_lms_discrete.LMSDiscreteScheduler,
diffusers.schedulers.scheduling_ddim.DDIMScheduler,
diffusers.schedulers.scheduling_dpmsolver_multistep.DPMSolverMultistepScheduler,
diffusers.schedulers.scheduling_euler_discrete.EulerDiscreteScheduler,
diffusers.schedulers.scheduling_pndm.PNDMScheduler,
diffusers.schedulers.scheduling_ddpm.DDPMScheduler,
diffusers.schedulers.scheduling_euler_ancestral_discrete.EulerAncestralDiscreteScheduler]
```
Cool, lots of schedulers to look at. Feel free to have a look at their respective class definitions:
- [`LMSDiscreteScheduler`],
- [`DDIMScheduler`],
- [`DPMSolverMultistepScheduler`],
- [`EulerDiscreteScheduler`],
- [`PNDMScheduler`],
- [`DDPMScheduler`],
- [`EulerAncestralDiscreteScheduler`].
We will now compare the input prompt with all other schedulers. To change the scheduler of the pipeline you can make use of the
convenient [`ConfigMixin.config`] property in combination with the [`ConfigMixin.from_config`] function.
```python
pipeline.scheduler.config
```
returns a dictionary of the configuration of the scheduler:
**Output**:
```
FrozenDict([('num_train_timesteps', 1000),
('beta_start', 0.00085),
('beta_end', 0.012),
('beta_schedule', 'scaled_linear'),
('trained_betas', None),
('skip_prk_steps', True),
('set_alpha_to_one', False),
('steps_offset', 1),
('_class_name', 'PNDMScheduler'),
('_diffusers_version', '0.8.0.dev0'),
('clip_sample', False)])
```
This configuration can then be used to instantiate a scheduler
of a different class that is compatible with the pipeline. Here,
we change the scheduler to the [`DDIMScheduler`].
```python
from diffusers import DDIMScheduler
pipeline.scheduler = DDIMScheduler.from_config(pipeline.scheduler.config)
```
Cool, now we can run the pipeline again to compare the generation quality.
```python
generator = torch.Generator(device="cuda").manual_seed(8)
image = pipeline(prompt, generator=generator).images[0]
image
```
## Compare schedulers
So far we have tried running the stable diffusion pipeline with two schedulers: [`PNDMScheduler`] and [`DDIMScheduler`].
A number of better schedulers have been released that can be run with much fewer steps, let's compare them here:
[`LMSDiscreteScheduler`] usually leads to better results:
```python
from diffusers import LMSDiscreteScheduler
pipeline.scheduler = LMSDiscreteScheduler.from_config(pipeline.scheduler.config)
generator = torch.Generator(device="cuda").manual_seed(8)
image = pipeline(prompt, generator=generator).images[0]
image
```
[`EulerDiscreteScheduler`] and [`EulerAncestralDiscreteScheduler`] can generate high quality results with as little as 30 steps.
```python
from diffusers import EulerDiscreteScheduler
pipeline.scheduler = EulerDiscreteScheduler.from_config(pipeline.scheduler.config)
generator = torch.Generator(device="cuda").manual_seed(8)
image = pipeline(prompt, generator=generator, num_inference_steps=30).images[0]
image
```
and:
```python
from diffusers import EulerAncestralDiscreteScheduler
pipeline.scheduler = EulerAncestralDiscreteScheduler.from_config(pipeline.scheduler.config)
generator = torch.Generator(device="cuda").manual_seed(8)
image = pipeline(prompt, generator=generator, num_inference_steps=30).images[0]
image
```
At the time of writing this doc [`DPMSolverMultistepScheduler`] gives arguably the best speed/quality trade-off and can be run with as little
as 20 steps.
```python
from diffusers import DPMSolverMultistepScheduler
pipeline.scheduler = DPMSolverMultistepScheduler.from_config(pipeline.scheduler.config)
generator = torch.Generator(device="cuda").manual_seed(8)
image = pipeline(prompt, generator=generator, num_inference_steps=20).images[0]
image
```
As you can see most images look very similar and are arguably of very similar quality. It often really depends on the specific use case which scheduler to choose. A good approach is always to run multiple different
schedulers to compare results.