English

FourTune: Towards Fully 4-Bit Efficient Post-Training for Diffusion Models

Machine Learning 2026-07-07 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Diffusion models have become a dominant paradigm for high-quality generative modeling, while post-training is essential for adapting them to diverse downstream applications. However, post-training of large diffusion models is still challenging due to the prohibitive memory footprints and slow training speed, which existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods only partially address. To overcome these limitations, we propose FourTune, an efficient post-training framework for diffusion models based on an end-to-end W4A4G4 paradigm. FourTune introduces a triple-branch hybrid pipeline that augments the standard LoRA architecture with a frozen numerical stabilizer to isolate quantization-sensitive outliers, enabling stable training under native 4-bit computation. In addition, FourTune employs hardware-efficient block-wise quantization and customized fused kernels to support efficient quantized backpropagation and reduce memory bandwidth overhead. Across customization, reinforcement learning, and distillation tasks, FourTune matches the quality of full-precision fine-tuning. On FLUX.1-dev (12B), FourTune reduces memory overhead by 2.25×\times and increases end-to-end training throughput by 2.27×\times compared to BF16 LoRA.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.05711,
  title  = {FourTune: Towards Fully 4-Bit Efficient Post-Training for Diffusion Models},
  author = {Bowen Xue and Zihan Min and Xingyang Li and Zhekai Zhang and Haocheng Xi and Lvmin Zhang and Maneesh Agrawala and Jun-Yan Zhu and Song Han and Yujun Lin and Muyang Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.05711},
  year   = {2026}
}