Abstract:The quadratic cost of attention is a major bottleneck in diffusion-based video generation models. MXFP4 attention provides a promising path toward efficient inference, but direct MXFP4 quantization often degrades generation quality due to two numerical issues: the clipping-underflow trade-off from power-of-two scaling and the row-wise normalization error introduced in the softmax loop. We propose MXAttention, a data-free post-training quantization framework for MXFP4 attention. MXAttention introduces two components: Universal Optimal Scaling (UOS), which exploits the periodic structure of power-of-two microscaling to derive a distribution-independent optimal scaling boundary Qmax=7.25 without calibration or search, and Pre-Normalization Quantization (PNQ), which quantizes unnormalized softmax exponentials before row-wise summation to preserve normalization by construction. Experiments on Wan2.2 and HunyuanVideo show that MXAttention closes at least 95% of the VBench Imaging Quality gap between OCP MXFP4 and FP16, substantially improves frame-level similarity, and preserves FP16-level generation quality with less than 0.01 absolute degradation on all reported VBench metrics. MXAttention also achieves performance competitive with strong NVFP4-based baselines with negligible overhead when fused into the attention pipeline. The implementation is publicly available in MindIE-SD.
Abstract:In video and image generation tasks, Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models incur extremely high computational costs due to attention mechanisms, which limits their practical applications. Furthermore, with hardware advancements, a wide range of devices besides graphics processing unit (GPU), such as application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), have been increasingly adopted for model inference. Sparse attention, which leverages the inherent sparsity of attention by skipping computations for insignificant tokens, is an effective approach to mitigate computational costs. However, existing sparse attention methods have two critical limitations: the overhead of sparse pattern prediction and the lack of hardware generality, as most of these methods are designed for GPU. To address these challenges, this study proposes RainFusion2.0, which aims to develop an online adaptive, hardware-efficient, and low-overhead sparse attention mechanism to accelerate both video and image generative models, with robust performance across diverse hardware platforms. Key technical insights include: (1) leveraging block-wise mean values as representative tokens for sparse mask prediction; (2) implementing spatiotemporal-aware token permutation; and (3) introducing a first-frame sink mechanism specifically designed for video generation scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that RainFusion2.0 can achieve 80% sparsity while achieving an end-to-end speedup of 1.5~1.8x without compromising video quality. Moreover, RainFusion2.0 demonstrates effectiveness across various generative models and validates its generalization across diverse hardware platforms.