What does one stage of progressive diffusion distillation do?

Question: In progressive distillation for a deterministic diffusion sampler, what is the primary objective of one distillation stage? A) Replace the diffusion model with an adversarial discriminator while preserving its likelihood B) Learn the forward noising process using twice as many timesteps as the teacher C) Train a student so that one student sampling step approximates the result of two teacher sampling steps D) Reduce model parameters by half while preserving the original number of sampling steps Correct: C Explanation: Each progressive-distillation stage teaches a student to reproduce in one step what the current teacher performs in two. Repeating the process progressively halves the required number of sampling steps; it is not fundamentally a parameter-pruning procedure. Topic: advanced ML / diffusion models / model distillation