Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Diffusion Transformer (DiT) has now become the preferred choice for building image generation models due to its great generation capability. Unlike previous convolution-based UNet models, DiT is purely composed of a stack of transformer blocks, which renders DiT excellent in scalability like large language models. However, the growing model size and multi-step sampling paradigm bring about considerable pressure on deployment and inference. In this work, we propose a post-training quantization framework tailored for Diffusion Transforms to tackle these challenges. We firstly locate that the quantization difficulty of DiT mainly originates from the time-dependent channel-specific outliers. We propose a timestep-aware shift-and-scale strategy to smooth the activation distribution to reduce the quantization error. Secondly, based on the observation that activations of adjacent timesteps have similar distributions, we utilize a hierarchical clustering scheme to divide the denoising timesteps into multiple groups. We further design a re-parameterization scheme which absorbs the quantization parameters into nearby module to avoid redundant computations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that out PTQ method successfully quantize the Diffusion Transformer into 8-bit weight and 8-bit activation (W8A8) with state-of-the-art FiD score. And our method can further quantize DiT model into 4-bit weight and 8-bit activation (W4A8) without sacrificing generation quality.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Ding, Ning, Han, Jing, Tian, Yuchuan, Xu, Chao, Han, Kai, Tang, Yehui
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4417066028
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: