FourTune: True 4-bit Diffusion Post-Training

amaarora · x · 2026-07-19

FourTune addresses the fact that **diffusion model post-training doesn't truly become 4-bit just by quantizing weights to 4-bit**, as activations and backward gradients still dominate compute and memory overhead. It proposes three design choices to stabilize and accelerate training: - A frozen stabilizer branch to handle quantization-sensitive outliers; - Block quantization to enable transposed matrix multiplication in 4-bit backpropagation; - Fused kernels to reduce memory traffic from small branches. Experimentally, the authors report that on FLUX customization tasks, the method achieves **2.25x lower memory** and **2.27x faster stepping** compared to BF16 LoRA. The accompanying charts compare training latency, memory footprint, and customization quality across different settings.

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