FourTune: Towards Fully 4-Bit Efficient Post-Training for Diffusion Models
About
Diffusion models have become a dominant paradigm for high-quality generative modeling, while post-training is essential for adapting them to diverse downstream applications. However, post-training of large diffusion models is still challenging due to the prohibitive memory footprints and slow training speed, which existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods only partially address. To overcome these limitations, we propose FourTune, an efficient post-training framework for diffusion models based on an end-to-end W4A4G4 paradigm. FourTune introduces a triple-branch hybrid pipeline that augments the standard LoRA architecture with a frozen numerical stabilizer to isolate quantization-sensitive outliers, enabling stable training under native 4-bit computation. In addition, FourTune employs hardware-efficient block-wise quantization and customized fused kernels to support efficient quantized backpropagation and reduce memory bandwidth overhead. Across customization, reinforcement learning, and distillation tasks, FourTune matches the quality of full-precision fine-tuning. On FLUX.1-dev (12B), FourTune reduces memory overhead by 2.25$\times$ and increases end-to-end training throughput by 2.27$\times$ compared to BF16 LoRA.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Identity Customization | FLUX.1 (dev) | Similarity Score78.3 | 11 | |
| Identity Customization | Qwen-Image | Similarity0.703 | 8 | |
| Reinforcement Learning | FLUX.1 dev SRPO protocol v1.0 (test) | Aes6.3119 | 5 | |
| Model Distillation | HPS prompts v2 | FID15.5 | 4 | |
| Style Customization | FLUX.1 (dev) | Similarity0.812 | 4 | |
| Style Customization | Qwen-Image | Similarity70.1 | 4 | |
| Model Distillation | COCO 10k prompts | FID6.7 | 4 | |
| Identity Customization | SDXL | Similarity0.453 | 2 |