DMQ: Dissecting Outliers of Diffusion Models for Post-Training Quantization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Dongyeun, Hur, Jiwan, Shon, Hyounguk, Lee, Jae Young, Kim, Junmo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Dongyeun
Hur, Jiwan
Shon, Hyounguk
Lee, Jae Young
Kim, Junmo
author_facet Lee, Dongyeun
Hur, Jiwan
Shon, Hyounguk
Lee, Jae Young
Kim, Junmo
contents Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation but come with significant computational costs, posing challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Recent post-training quantization (PTQ) methods have attempted to mitigate this issue by focusing on the iterative nature of diffusion models. However, these approaches often overlook outliers, leading to degraded performance at low bit-widths. In this paper, we propose a DMQ which combines Learned Equivalent Scaling (LES) and channel-wise Power-of-Two Scaling (PTS) to effectively address these challenges. Learned Equivalent Scaling optimizes channel-wise scaling factors to redistribute quantization difficulty between weights and activations, reducing overall quantization error. Recognizing that early denoising steps, despite having small quantization errors, crucially impact the final output due to error accumulation, we incorporate an adaptive timestep weighting scheme to prioritize these critical steps during learning. Furthermore, identifying that layers such as skip connections exhibit high inter-channel variance, we introduce channel-wise Power-of-Two Scaling for activations. To ensure robust selection of PTS factors even with small calibration set, we introduce a voting algorithm that enhances reliability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing works, especially at low bit-widths such as W4A6 (4-bit weight, 6-bit activation) and W4A8, maintaining high image generation quality and model stability. The code is available at https://github.com/LeeDongYeun/dmq.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_12933
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DMQ: Dissecting Outliers of Diffusion Models for Post-Training Quantization
Lee, Dongyeun
Hur, Jiwan
Shon, Hyounguk
Lee, Jae Young
Kim, Junmo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation but come with significant computational costs, posing challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Recent post-training quantization (PTQ) methods have attempted to mitigate this issue by focusing on the iterative nature of diffusion models. However, these approaches often overlook outliers, leading to degraded performance at low bit-widths. In this paper, we propose a DMQ which combines Learned Equivalent Scaling (LES) and channel-wise Power-of-Two Scaling (PTS) to effectively address these challenges. Learned Equivalent Scaling optimizes channel-wise scaling factors to redistribute quantization difficulty between weights and activations, reducing overall quantization error. Recognizing that early denoising steps, despite having small quantization errors, crucially impact the final output due to error accumulation, we incorporate an adaptive timestep weighting scheme to prioritize these critical steps during learning. Furthermore, identifying that layers such as skip connections exhibit high inter-channel variance, we introduce channel-wise Power-of-Two Scaling for activations. To ensure robust selection of PTS factors even with small calibration set, we introduce a voting algorithm that enhances reliability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing works, especially at low bit-widths such as W4A6 (4-bit weight, 6-bit activation) and W4A8, maintaining high image generation quality and model stability. The code is available at https://github.com/LeeDongYeun/dmq.
title DMQ: Dissecting Outliers of Diffusion Models for Post-Training Quantization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12933