The disparity in healthcare personnel expertise and medical resources across different regions of the world is a pressing social issue. Artificial intelligence technology offers new opportunities to alleviate this issue. Segment Anything Model (SAM), which excels in intelligent image segmentation, has demonstrated exceptional performance in medical monitoring and assisted diagnosis. Unfortunately, the huge computational and storage overhead of SAM poses significant challenges for deployment on resource-limited edge devices. Quantization is an effective solution for model compression; however, traditional methods rely heavily on original data for calibration, which raises widespread concerns about medical data privacy and security. In this paper, we propose a data-free quantization framework for SAM, called DFQ-SAM, which learns and calibrates quantization parameters without any original data, thus effectively preserving data privacy during model compression. Specifically, we propose pseudo-positive label evolution for segmentation, combined with patch similarity, to fully leverage the semantic and distribution priors in pre-trained models, which facilitates high-quality data synthesis as a substitute for real data. Furthermore, we introduce scale reparameterization to ensure the accuracy of low-bit quantization. We perform extensive segmentation experiments on various datasets, and DFQ-SAM consistently provides significant performance on low-bit quantization. DFQ-SAM eliminates the need for data transfer in cloud-edge collaboration, thereby protecting sensitive data from potential attacks. It enables secure, fast, and personalized healthcare services at the edge, which enhances system efficiency and optimizes resource allocation, and thus facilitating the pervasive application of artificial intelligence in worldwide healthcare.
Model quantization is an effective approach to reduce the complexity of neural networks, enabling them to be deployed on resource-constrained edge devices. Recently, data-free quantization has been widely investigated, since it does not access the original datasets and can address the widely-held data privacy and security concerns. Its idea is to generate fake data depending on the prior information in the full-precision (FP) model, and then fine-tune the quantized model with them under the supervision of the FP model. The quantization performance relies heavily on the validity of the generated data, however, existing methods suffer from two severe issues: mode collapse and (catastrophic) example forgetting, leading to non-trivial accuracy degradation. In this work, we propose Contrastive Learning Quantization (CoLeQ), which achieves data diversity enhancement and old knowledge restoration via contrastive learning to address the above issues. Specifically, we introduce the MoCo paradigm that maintains a dynamic momentum queue of the encoded features to data-free quantization. The contrastive learning objective is used to improve data diversity by facilitating the separation of generated samples from the already generated ones in previous mini-batches, thus mitigating the mode collapse problem. Moreover, we design a tied-weight decoder to restore the previous samples from the encoded features in the queue without additional parameters and training, hence cost-effectively preventing the example forgetting problem. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of CoLeQ, and the results demonstrate a consistent superiority compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved impressive performance in text-to-image and text-to-video generation. However, their high computational cost and large parameter sizes pose significant challenges for usage in resource-constrained scenarios. Effective compression of models has become a crucial issue that urgently needs to be addressed. Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a promising solution to reduce memory usage and accelerate inference, but existing PTQ methods suffer from severe performance degradation under extreme low-bit settings. After experiments and analysis, we identify two key obstacles to low-bit PTQ for DiTs: (1) the weights of DiT models follow a Gaussian-like distribution with long tails, causing uniform quantization to poorly allocate intervals and leading to significant quantization errors. This issue has been observed in the linear layer weights of different DiT models, which deeply limits the performance. (2) two types of activation outliers in DiT models: (i) Mild Outliers with slightly elevated values, and (ii) Salient Outliers with large magnitudes concentrated in specific channels, which disrupt activation quantization. To address these issues, we propose LRQ-DiT, an efficient and accurate post-training quantization framework for image and video generation. First, we introduce Twin-Log Quantization (TLQ), a log-based method that allocates more quantization intervals to the intermediate dense regions, effectively achieving alignment with the weight distribution and reducing quantization errors. Second, we propose an Adaptive Rotation Scheme (ARS) that dynamically applies Hadamard or outlier-aware rotations based on activation fluctuation, effectively mitigating the impact of both types of outliers.Extensive experiments on various text-to-image and text-to-video DiT models demonstrate that LRQ-DiT preserves high generation quality.
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have demonstrated impressive performance in image generation but suffer from substantial computational overhead and resource consumption. Post-training pruning offers a promising solution; however, due to DiTs' unique architectural design and parameter distribution, traditional pruning methods are inapplicable, leading to significant performance degradation. Specifically, prior methods developed for LLMs, which derive metrics through a series of approximations, amplify the relative contribution of weights in the saliency metric. In addition, weights in DiTs exhibit significantly larger magnitudes than those in LLMs. Moreover, existing pruning granularity overlooks variations in model structures. In this paper, we propose DiT-Pruning, which improves pruning performance by introducing customized saliency criteria and pruning granularity. We design a novel metric that balances the contributions of weights and activations from an energy-based perspective, enabling more effective identification of important elements. Furthermore, we observe distinct clustering patterns in the two-dimensional weight space. Accordingly, we adopt a clustering-aware pruning granularity, enabling effective sparse allocation. Extensive evaluations on various DiTs show that our method consistently preserves image quality, especially under high sparsity. For FLUX.1-dev at 512x512 resolution on MJHQ, DiT-Pruning achieves only a 0.001 loss in CLIP score at 50
AutoRegressive Visual Generation (ARVG) models retain an architecture compatible with language models, while achieving performance comparable to diffusion-based models. Quantization is commonly employed in neural networks to reduce model size and computational latency. However, applying quantization to ARVG remains largely underexplored, and existing quantization methods fail to generalize effectively to ARVG models. In this paper, we explore this issue and identify three key challenges: (1) severe outliers at channel-wise level, (2) highly dynamic activations at token-wise level, and (3) mismatched distribution information at sample-wise level. To these ends, we propose PTQ4ARVG, a training-free post-training quantization (PTQ) framework consisting of: (1) Gain-Projected Scaling (GPS) mitigates the channel-wise outliers, which expands the quantization loss via a Taylor series to quantify the gain of scaling for activation-weight quantization, and derives the optimal scaling factor through differentiation. (2) Static Token-Wise Quantization (STWQ) leverages the inherent properties of ARVG, fixed token length and position-invariant distribution across samples, to address token-wise variance without incurring dynamic calibration overhead. (3) Distribution-Guided Calibration (DGC) selects samples that contribute most to distributional entropy, eliminating the sample-wise distribution mismatch. Extensive experiments show that PTQ4ARVG can effectively quantize the ARVG family models to 8-bit and 6-bit while maintaining competitive performance.
The Diffusion Transformer (DiT) has become a popular backbone for high-quality image and video generation. However, scaling DiT to larger model sizes and higher resolutions substantially increases memory and com putational costs, making efficient deployment challenging. Post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a practical compression approach that reduces memory footprint and accelerates inference. Yet, under ultra-low-bit settings, DiT models often suffer from pronounced quality degradation and may even collapse. To tackle this challenge, we propose R2Q-DiT, a PTQ framework tailored for DiT. We first observe that DiT weights exhibit a Gaussian-like distribution: most values cluster near zero, while a small fraction is distributed on both sides. This distribution causes uniform quantization to allocate insufficient resolution to the bulk of weights, leading to large quantiza tion errors at low bit-widths. Accordingly, we introduce an Adaptive Reshape Quantizer (ARQ) that applies a nonlinear exponential transformation to squeeze the weight range and flatten the distribution, making it more amenable to low-bit quantization. Moreover, we find that global Hadamard rotation, although helpful for reducing activation outliers, cannot fully suppress salient outliers and may unnecessarily perturb non-outlier activations. We therefore propose Fine-Grained Rotation (FGR), which disperses outliers via channel permutation, attenuates them through block-wise rotation, and facilitates more accurate group-wise quantization. Extensive experiments on representative image and video generation models, including PixArt, FLUX, and OpenSORA, demonstrate that our method R2Q-DiT consistently outperforms existing mainstream PTQ methods, with particularly strong gains under ultra-low-bit quantization scenarios.
Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) shows excellent performance in video object segmentation tasks; however, the heavy computational burden hinders its application in real-time video processing. Although there have been efforts to improve the efficiency of SAM2, most of them focus on retraining a lightweight backbone, with little exploration into post-training acceleration. In this paper, we observe that SAM2 exhibits sparse perception pattern as biological vision, which provides opportunities for eliminating redundant computation and acceleration: i) In mask decoder, the attention primarily focuses on the foreground objects, whereas the image encoder in the earlier stage exhibits a broad attention span, which results in unnecessary computation to background regions. ii) In memory bank, only a small subset of tokens in each frame contribute significantly to memory attention, and the salient regions exhibit temporal consistency, making full-token computation redundant. With these insights, we propose Efficient-SAM2, which promotes SAM2 to adaptively focus on object regions while eliminating task-irrelevant computations, thereby significantly improving inference efficiency. Specifically, for image encoder, we propose object-aware Sparse Window Routing (SWR), a window-level computation allocation mechanism that leverages the consistency and saliency cues from the previous-frame decoder to route background regions into a lightweight shortcut branch. Moreover, for memory attention, we propose object-aware Sparse Memory Retrieval (SMR), which allows only the salient memory tokens in each frame to participate in computation, with the saliency pattern reused from their first recollection. With negligible additional parameters and minimal training overhead, Efficient-SAM2 delivers 1.68$\times$ speedup on SAM2.1-L model with only 1.0\% accuracy drop on SA-V test set, where SWR and SMR provide 1.83$\times$ and 1.78$\times$ speedups, respectively.
Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision with wide-ranging applications, including autonomous driving and robotics. While RGB-based methods have achieved strong performance with CNNs and Transformers, their effectiveness degrades under fast motion, low-light, or high dynamic range conditions due to limitations of frame cameras. Event cameras offer complementary advantages such as high temporal resolution and low latency, yet lack color and texture, making them insufficient on their own. To address this, recent research has explored multimodal fusion of RGB and event data; however, many existing approaches are computationally expensive and focus primarily on spatial fusion, neglecting the temporal dynamics inherent in event streams. In this work, we propose MambaSeg, a novel dual-branch semantic segmentation framework that employs parallel Mamba encoders to efficiently model RGB images and event streams. To reduce cross-modal ambiguity, we introduce the Dual-Dimensional Interaction Module (DDIM), comprising a Cross-Spatial Interaction Module (CSIM) and a Cross-Temporal Interaction Module (CTIM), which jointly perform fine-grained fusion along both spatial and temporal dimensions. This design improves cross-modal alignment, reduces ambiguity, and leverages the complementary properties of each modality. Extensive experiments on the DDD17 and DSEC datasets demonstrate that MambaSeg achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance while significantly reducing computational cost, showcasing its promise for efficient, scalable, and robust multimodal perception.
Diffusion models have achieved great success in image generation tasks. However, the lengthy denoising process and complex neural networks hinder their low-latency applications in real-world scenarios. Quantization can effectively reduce model complexity, and post-training quantization (PTQ), which does not require fine-tuning, is highly promising for compressing and accelerating diffusion models. Unfortunately, we find that due to the highly dynamic activations, existing PTQ methods suffer from distribution mismatch issues at both calibration sample level and reconstruction output level, which makes the performance far from satisfactory. In this paper, we propose EDA-DM, a standardized PTQ method that efficiently addresses the above issues. Specifically, at the calibration sample level, we extract information from the density and diversity of latent space feature maps, which guides the selection of calibration samples to align with the overall sample distribution; and at the reconstruction output level, we theoretically analyze the reasons for previous reconstruction failures and, based on this insight, optimize block reconstruction using the Hessian loss of layers, aligning the outputs of quantized model and full-precision model at different network granularity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDA-DM significantly outperforms the existing PTQ methods across various models and datasets. Our method achieves a $1.83\times $ speedup and $4\times $ compression for the popular Stable-Diffusion on MS-COCO, with only a 0.05 loss in CLIP score. Code is available at http://github.com/BienLuky/EDA-DM.
Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zero-shot segmentation capability; however, its prohibitive computational costs make edge deployment challenging. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a promising compression solution, existing methods yield unsatisfactory results when applied to SAM, owing to its specialized model components and promptable workflow: (i) The mask decoder's attention exhibits extreme activation outliers, and we find that aggressive clipping (even 100x), without smoothing or isolation, is effective in suppressing outliers while maintaining performance. Unfortunately, traditional distribution-based metrics (e.g., MSE) fail to provide such large-scale clipping. (ii) Existing quantization reconstruction methods neglect semantic interactivity of SAM, leading to misalignment between image feature and prompt intention. To address the above issues, we propose SAQ-SAM in this paper, which boosts PTQ for SAM from the perspective of semantic alignment. Specifically, we propose Perceptual-Consistency Clipping, which exploits attention focus overlap to promote aggressive clipping while preserving semantic capabilities. Furthermore, we propose Prompt-Aware Reconstruction, which incorporates image-prompt interactions by leveraging cross-attention in mask decoder, thus facilitating alignment in both distribution and semantic. Moreover, to ensure the interaction efficiency, we design a layer-skipping strategy for image tokens in encoder. Extensive experiments are conducted on various SAM sizes and tasks, including instance segmentation, oriented object detection, and semantic segmentation, and the results show that our method consistently exhibits advantages. For example, when quantizing SAM-B to 4-bit, SAQ-SAM achieves 11.7% higher mAP than the baseline in instance segmentation task.
Stereo vision-based 3D reconstruction for moving objects has been applied in diverse domains, such as robotic navigation and autonomous driving. However, conventional vision systems often fail to achieve both high reconstruction accuracy for moving objects over a large field of view (FOV) due to imaging degradation and the tendency of objects to exceed the FOV. To overcome these limitations, we propose a dual-galvanometer-based active stereo vision system for large-FOV high-precision 3D reconstruction of moving objects. Firstly, we design a dual-galvanometer-based vision system that rapidly and stably switches camera viewpoints. Following that, we propose a synchronous detection algorithm that can actively capture stereo image pairs and detect moving objects across the enlarged FOV. Then, we build a system-level high-precision 3D stereo reconstruction framework that tightly couples viewpoint switching, synchronized detection, and high-precision 3D reconstruction to improve the reconstruction accuracy and robustness of fast-moving objects. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system: compared with the fixed-lens FOV, the observable FOV is expanded by 53.7x, while the best-case reconstruction error for a 20 mm moving ball remains below 0.03 mm in the large-FOV workspace.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and generation tasks. However, their massive parameter scale leads to significant resource consumption and latency during inference. Post-training weight-only quantization offers a promising solution by reducing model size and accelerating token generation through alleviating the memory-bound issue. Nevertheless, there are inherent systematic outliers in weights, and although some efforts have attempted to address them, such as scaling and rotation, the performance of low-bit quantization remains far from satisfactory. In this paper, we propose Outlier Self-Absorption Quantization (OSAQ), which performs second-order low-rank derived additive weight suppression for low-bit weight-only LLM quantization. Specifically, we observe that Hessian exhibits low-rank consistency across different inputs, with certain directions persistently lacking strength. Leveraging this property, we construct an additive weight transformation based on the Hessian’s null space, thereby suppressing weight outliers without affecting the task loss. This additive transformation can be absorbed into the weights offline, requiring no inter-layer transformations and introducing no inference overhead. Moreover, the construction is efficiently achieved by a closed-form solution, without resource-intensive training or iterative procedures. Extensive experiments across models of varying scales and tasks are conducted, and the results show that OSAQ effectively suppresses outliers and improves low-bit quantization performance.
The rapid development of visual generative models raises the need for more scalable and human-aligned evaluation methods. While the crowdsourced Arena platforms offer human preference assessments by collecting human votes, they are costly and time-consuming, inherently limiting their scalability. Leveraging vision-language model (VLMs) as substitutes for manual judgments presents a promising solution. However, the inherent hallucinations and biases of VLMs hinder alignment with human preferences, thus compromising evaluation reliability. Additionally, the static evaluation approach lead to low efficiency. In this paper, we propose K-Sort Eval, a reliable and efficient VLM-based evaluation framework that integrates posterior correction and dynamic matching. Specifically, we curate a high-quality dataset from thousands of human votes in K-Sort Arena, with each instance containing the outputs and rankings of K models. When evaluating a new model, it undergoes (K+1)-wise free-for-all comparisons with existing models, and the VLM provide the rankings. To enhance alignment and reliability, we propose a posterior correction method, which adaptively corrects the posterior probability in Bayesian updating based on the consistency between the VLM prediction and human supervision. Moreover, we propose a dynamic matching strategy, which balances uncertainty and diversity to maximize the expected benefit of each comparison, thus ensuring more efficient evaluation. Extensive experiments show that K-Sort Eval delivers evaluation results consistent with K-Sort Arena, typically requiring fewer than 90 model runs, demonstrating both its efficiency and reliability. The dataset and code are publicly available.
Event-based semantic segmentation has great potential in autonomous driving and robotics due to the advantages of event cameras, such as high dynamic range, low latency, and low power cost. Unfortunately, current artificial neural network (ANN)-based segmentation methods suffer from high computational demands, the requirements for image frames, and massive energy consumption, limiting their efficiency and application on resource-constrained edge/mobile platforms. To address these problems, we introduce SLTNet, a Spike-driven Lightweight Transformer-based Network designed for event-based semantic segmentation. Specifically, SLTNet is built on efficient spike-driven convolution blocks (SCBs) to extract rich semantic features while reducing the model's parameters. Then, to enhance the long-range contextual feature interaction, we propose novel spike-driven transformer blocks (STBs) with binary mask operations. Based on these basic blocks, SLT-Net employs a high-efficiency single-branch architecture while maintaining the low energy consumption of the Spiking Neural Network (SNN). Finally, extensive experiments on DDD17 and DSEC-Semantic datasets demonstrate that SLTNet outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) SNN-based methods by at most 9.06% and 9.39% mIoU, respectively, with extremely 4.58x lower energy consumption and 114 FPS inference speed. Our code is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/ longxianlei/SLTNet- v1.0.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as the fundamental architecture for most computer vision fields, but the considerable memory and computation costs hinders their application on resource-limited devices. As one of the most powerful compression methods, binarization reduces the computation of the neural network by quantizing the weights and activation values as $\pm$1. Although existing binarization methods have demonstrated excellent performance on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the full binarization of ViTs is still under-studied and suffering a significant performance drop. In this paper, we first argue empirically that the severe performance degradation is mainly caused by the weight oscillation in the binarization training and the information distortion in the activation of ViTs. Based on these analyses, we propose $\textbf{BinaryViT}$, an accurate full binarization scheme for ViTs, which pushes the quantization of ViTs to the limit. Specifically, we propose a novel gradient regularization scheme (GRS) for driving a bimodal distribution of the weights to reduce oscillation in binarization training. Moreover, we design an activation shift module (ASM) to adaptively tune the activation distribution to reduce the information distortion caused by binarization. Extensive experiments on ImageNet dataset show that our BinaryViT consistently surpasses the strong baseline by 2.05% and improve the accuracy of fully binarized ViTs to a usable level. Furthermore, our method achieves impressive savings of 16.2$\times$ and 17.7$\times$ in model size and OPs compared to the full-precision DeiT-S.
Diffusion models have gradually gained prominence in the field of image synthesis, showcasing remarkable generative capabilities. Nevertheless, the slow inference and complex networks, resulting from redundancy at both temporal and structural levels, hinder their low-latency applications in real-world scenarios. Current acceleration methods for diffusion models focus separately on temporal and structural levels. However, independent optimization at each level to further push the acceleration limits results in significant performance degradation. On the other hand, integrating optimizations at both levels can compound the acceleration effects. Unfortunately, we find that the optimizations at these two levels are not entirely orthogonal. Performing separate optimizations and then simply integrating them results in unsatisfactory performance. To tackle this issue, we propose CacheQuant, a novel training-free paradigm that comprehensively accelerates diffusion models by jointly optimizing model caching and quantization techniques. Specifically, we employ a dynamic programming approach to determine the optimal cache schedule, in which the properties of caching and quantization are carefully considered to minimize errors. Additionally, we propose decoupled error correction to further mitigate the coupled and accumulated errors step by step. Experimental results show that CacheQuant achieves a 5.18x speedup and 4x compression for Stable Diffusion on MS-COCO, with only a 0.02 loss in CLIP score. Our code are open-sourced.
Model quantization is a promising method for accelerating and compressing diffusion models. Nevertheless, since post-training quantization (PTQ) fails catastrophically at low-bit cases, quantization-aware training (QAT) is essential. Unfortunately, the wide range and time-varying activations in diffusion models sharply increase the complexity of quantization, making existing QAT methods inefficient. Equivalent scaling can effectively reduce activation range, but previous methods remain the overall quantization error unchanged. More critically, these methods significantly disrupt the original weight distribution, resulting in poor weight initialization and challenging convergence during QAT training. In this paper, we propose a novel QAT framework for diffusion models, called DilateQuant. Specifically, we propose Weight Dilation (WD) that maximally dilates the unsaturated in-channel weights to a constrained range through equivalent scaling. WD decreases the activation range while preserving the original weight range, which steadily reduces the quantization error and ensures model convergence. To further enhance accuracy and efficiency, we design a Temporal Parallel Quantizer (TPQ) to address the time-varying activations and introduce a Block-wise Knowledge Distillation (BKD) to reduce resource consumption in training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DilateQuant significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Code is available at http://github.com/BienLuky/DilateQuant
Diffusion Transformers dominate video generation, but the quadratic complexity of attention computation introduces substantial latency. Attention sparsity reduces computational costs by focusing on critical tokens while ignoring non-critical tokens. However, existing methods suffer from severe performance degradation. In this paper, we revisit attention sparsity and reveal that existing methods induce systematic biases in attention allocation: (1) excessive focus on critical tokens amplifies their attention weights; (2) complete neglect of non-critical tokens causes the loss of relevant attention weights. To address these issues, we propose Rectified SpaAttn, which rectifies attention allocation with implicit full attention reference, thereby enhancing the alignment between sparse and full attention maps. Specifically: (1) for critical tokens, we show that their bias is proportional to the sparse attention weights, with the ratio governed by the amplified weights. Accordingly, we propose Isolated-Pooling Attention Reallocation, which calculates accurate rectification factors by reallocating multimodal pooled weights. (2) for non-critical tokens, recovering attention weights from the pooled query-key yields attention gains but also introduces pooling errors. Therefore, we propose Gain-Aware Pooling Rectification, which ensures that the rectified gain consistently surpasses the induced error. Moreover, we customize and integrate the Rectified SpaAttn kernel using Triton, achieving up to 3.33 and 2.08 times speedups on HunyuanVideo and Wan 2.1, respectively, while maintaining high generation quality. We release Rectified SpaAttn as open-source at https://github.com/BienLuky/Rectified-SpaAttn .