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A Systematic Study of Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion LLMs (arxiv.org)
1 point by badmonster on Aug 21, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They tested shrinking diffusion language models' numbers to fewer bits after training so they fit on phones, and found a few abnormally large values that ruin the usual packing trick. Across tasks and models, these oversized values were the main obstacle to keeping answers accurate.

Abstract · Quantization Meets dLLMs: A Systematic Study of Post-training Quantization for Diffusion LLMs

Recent advances in diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have introduced a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs for natural language generation tasks, leveraging full attention and denoising-based decoding strategies. However, the deployment of these models on edge devices remains challenging due to their massive parameter scale and high resource demands. While post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing AR LLMs, its applicability to dLLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic study on quantizing diffusion-based language models. We begin by identifying the presence of activation outliers, characterized by abnormally large activation values that dominate the dynamic range. These outliers pose a key challenge to low-bit quantization, as they make it difficult to preserve precision for the majority of values. More importantly, we implement state-of-the-art PTQ methods and conduct a comprehensive evaluation across multiple task types and model variants. Our analysis is structured along four key dimensions: bit-width, quantization method, task category, and model type. Through this multi-perspective evaluation, we offer practical insights into the quantization behavior of dLLMs under different configurations. We hope our findings provide a foundation for future research in efficient dLLM deployment. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/FelixMessi/QDLM.

Haokun Lin, Haobo Xu, Yichen Wu, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Zhichao Lu, Ying Wei, Qingfu Zhang, Zhenan Sun
arXiv:2508.14896 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Aug 20, 2025 · updated Mar 13, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Published in Machine Intelligence Research, DOI: 10.1007/s11633-025-1624-x

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