Your diffusion model takes too long per image. How do you speed up sampling?
Sampling cost factors cleanly into steps, forward passes per step, and cost per step, and each factor has a different lever. Two of the biggest wins are free, and most teams take neither.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Sampling cost factors cleanly into steps, forward passes per step, and cost per step, and each factor has a different lever. Two of the biggest wins are free, and most teams take neither.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
