QVGen: Pushing the Limit of Quantized Video Generative Models
Authors: name: Yushi Huang; name: Ruihao Gong; name: Jing Liu; name: Yifu Ding; name: Chengtao Lv; name: Haotong Qin; name: Jun Zhang
Published: 2025-05-16 17:59:40

Abstract: Video diffusion models (DMs) have enabled high-quality video synthesis. Yet,
their substantial computational and memory demands pose serious challenges to
real-world deployment, even on high-end GPUs. As a commonly adopted solution,
quantization has proven notable success in reducing cost for image DMs, while
its direct application to video DMs remains ineffective. In this paper, we
present QVGen, a novel quantization-aware training (QAT) framework tailored for
high-performance and inference-efficient video DMs under extremely low-bit
quantization (e.g., 4-bit or below). We begin with a theoretical analysis
demonstrating that reducing the gradient norm is essential to facilitate
convergence for QAT. To this end, we introduce auxiliary modules (Phi) to
mitigate large quantization errors, leading to significantly enhanced
convergence. To eliminate the inference overhead of Phi, we propose a
rank-decay strategy that progressively eliminates Phi. Specifically, we
repeatedly employ singular value decomposition (SVD) and a proposed rank-based
regularization gamma to identify and decay low-contributing
components. This strategy retains performance while zeroing out inference
overhead. Extensive experiments across 4 state-of-the-art (SOTA) video DMs,
with parameter sizes ranging from 1.3B sim14B, show that QVGen is the
first to reach full-precision comparable quality under 4-bit settings.
Moreover, it significantly outperforms existing methods. For instance, our
3-bit CogVideoX-2B achieves improvements of +25.28 in Dynamic Degree and
+8.43 in Scene Consistency on VBench.