Title: QVGen: Pushing the Limit of Quantized Video Generative Models
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: quantization-aware training, video diffusion models

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 $\mathbf{\gamma}$ to identify and decay low-contributing components. This strategy retains performance while zeroing out additional inference overhead. Extensive experiments across $4$ state-of-the-art (SOTA) video DMs, with parameter sizes ranging from $1.3\text{B}\sim14\text{B}$, 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. *Code and videos are available in the supplementary material.*