AccuQuant: Simulating Multiple Denoising Steps for Quantizing Diffusion Models

We present in this paper a novel post-training quantization (PTQ) method, dubbed AccuQuant, for diffusion models. We show analytically and empirically that quantization errors for diffusion models are accumulated over denoising steps in a sampling process.

To alleviate the error accumulation problem, AccuQuant minimizes the discrepancies between outputs of a full-precision diffusion model and its quantized version within a couple of denoising steps. That is, it simulates multiple denoising steps of a diffusion sampling process explicitly for quantization, accounting the accumulated errors over multiple denoising steps, which is in contrast to previous approaches to imitating a training process of diffusion models, namely, minimizing the discrepancies independently for each step.

We also present an efficient implementation technique for AccuQuant, together with a novel objective, which reduces a memory complexity significantly from $\mathcal{O}(n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, where $n$ is the number of denoising steps. We demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of AccuQuant across various tasks and diffusion models on standard benchmarks.