SegQuant: A Semantics-Aware and Generalizable Quantization Framework for Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional generative capabilities but are computationally intensive, posing significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained or latency-sensitive environments.Quantization offers an effective means to reduce model size and computational cost, with post-training quantization (PTQ) being particularly appealing due to its compatibility with pre-trained models without requiring retraining or training data.However, existing PTQ methods for diffusion models often rely on manual, architecture-specific heuristics that limit their generalizability and hinder integration with industrial deployment pipelines.To address these limitations, we propose SegQuant, a deployment-aware quantization framework that adaptively combines complementary techniques to enhance cross-model versatility.SegQuant consists of a segment-aware, graph-based quantization strategy (SegLinear) that captures structural semantics and spatial heterogeneity, along with a dual-scale quantization scheme (DualScale) that preserves polarity-asymmetric activations using a hardware-native dual-path computation, avoiding performance penalties from custom implementations, which is crucial for maintaining visual fidelity in generated outputs.SegQuant is broadly applicable beyond Transformer-based diffusion models, achieving strong performance while ensuring seamless compatibility with mainstream deployment tools.