UltraGen: Efficient Ultra-High-Resolution Image Generation with Hierarchical Local Attention

Ultra-high-resolution image generation is increasingly vital for applications requiring fine-grained textures and global structural fidelity, yet state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion models such as FLUX and SD3 remain confined to sub 2MP (< 1K × 2K) resolutions due to the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms and the scarcity of high-quality high-resolution training data. We present UltraImageGen, a novel framework that introduces hierarchical local attention with low-resolution global guidance, enabling efficient, scalable, and semantically coherent image synthesis at ultra-high resolutions. Specifically, high-resolution latents are divided into hardware aligned fixed-size local windows to reduce attention complexity from quadratic to near-linear, while a low-resolution latent with scaled positional embeddings injects global semantics as an anchor. A lightweight LoRA adaptation bridges global and local pathways during denoising, ensuring consistency across structure and detail. To maximize efficiency and achieve scalable ultrahigh-resolution generation, we repermute token sequence in window-first order, so that the GPU-friendly dense local blocks in attention calculation equals to the fixed-size local window in 2D regardless of resolution. Together UltraImageGen reliably scales pretrained models to resolutions higher than 8K with more than 10× speed up and significantly lower memory usage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UltraImageGen achieves superior quality while maintaining computational efficiency, establishing a practical paradigm for advancing ultra-high-resolution image generation. Our project page and code are available here.