English

Post-Training Quantization for Audio Diffusion Transformers

Audio and Speech Processing 2025-10-02 v1 Sound

Abstract

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) enable high-quality audio synthesis but are often computationally intensive and require substantial storage, which limits their practical deployment. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of post-training quantization (PTQ) techniques for audio DiTs, analyzing the trade-offs between static and dynamic quantization schemes. We explore two practical extensions (1) a denoising-timestep-aware smoothing method that adapts quantization scales per-input-channel and timestep to mitigate activation outliers, and (2) a lightweight low-rank adapter (LoRA)-based branch derived from singular value decomposition (SVD) to compensate for residual weight errors. Using Stable Audio Open we benchmark W8A8 and W4A8 configurations across objective metrics and human perceptual ratings. Our results show that dynamic quantization preserves fidelity even at lower precision, while static methods remain competitive with lower latency. Overall, our findings show that low-precision DiTs can retain high-fidelity generation while reducing memory usage by up to 79%.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.00313,
  title  = {Post-Training Quantization for Audio Diffusion Transformers},
  author = {Tanmay Khandelwal and Magdalena Fuentes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.00313},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures, accepted at IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:09:08.087Z