Abstract:Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have emerged as the state-of-the-art backbone for high-fidelity image and video generation. However, their massive computational cost and memory footprint hinder deployment on edge devices. While post-training quantization (PTQ) has proven effective for large language models (LLMs), directly applying existing methods to DiTs yields suboptimal results due to the neglect of the unique temporal dynamics inherent in diffusion processes. In this paper, we propose AdaTSQ, a novel PTQ framework that pushes the Pareto frontier of efficiency and quality by exploiting the temporal sensitivity of DiTs. First, we propose a Pareto-aware timestep-dynamic bit-width allocation strategy. We model the quantization policy search as a constrained pathfinding problem. We utilize a beam search algorithm guided by end-to-end reconstruction error to dynamically assign layer-wise bit-widths across different timesteps. Second, we propose a Fisher-guided temporal calibration mechanism. It leverages temporal Fisher information to prioritize calibration data from highly sensitive timesteps, seamlessly integrating with Hessian-based weight optimization. Extensive experiments on four advanced DiTs (e.g., Flux-Dev, Flux-Schnell, Z-Image, and Wan2.1) demonstrate that AdaTSQ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like SVDQuant and ViDiT-Q. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Qiushao-E/AdaTSQ.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance, but their high compute and memory costs make deployment difficult in resource-constrained scenarios. Weight-only post-training quantization (PTQ) is appealing, as it reduces memory usage and enables practical speedup without low-bit operators or specialized hardware. However, accuracy often degrades significantly in weight-only PTQ at sub-4-bit precision, and our analysis identifies two main causes: (1) down-projection matrices are a well-known quantization bottleneck, but maintaining their fidelity often requires extra bit-width; (2) weight quantization induces activation deviations, but effective correction strategies remain underexplored. To address these issues, we propose D$^2$Quant, a novel weight-only PTQ framework that improves quantization from both the weight and activation perspectives. On the weight side, we design a Dual-Scale Quantizer (DSQ) tailored to down-projection matrices, with an absorbable scaling factor that significantly improves accuracy without increasing the bit budget. On the activation side, we propose Deviation-Aware Correction (DAC), which incorporates a mean-shift correction within LayerNorm to mitigate quantization-induced activation distribution shifts. Extensive experiments across multiple LLM families and evaluation metrics show that D$^2$Quant delivers superior performance for weight-only PTQ at sub-4-bit precision. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/XIANGLONGYAN/D2Quant.