Generative Vision Interview Questions #24 - The Trajectory Curvature Trap

When one-step distillation fails, model size isn't your bottleneck, it's the hidden complexity of the ODE path, and how constant-difficulty sub-problems actually solve it.

You’re in a Research Engineer interview at Google DeepMind and the interviewer asks:

“Your 1000-step diffusion teacher is too slow for production, so you distill it into a single-step student. The output is garbage. You swap in a bigger student. Still garbage. What’s actually broken?”

Don’t say: “The student doesn’t have enough capacity.” Wrong. You just …