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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.

Bowen Xue, Zihan Min, Xingyang Li, Zhekai Zhang, Haocheng Xi, Lvmin Zhang, Maneesh Agrawala, Jun-Yan Zhu, Song Han, Yujun Lin, Muyang Li• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Identity CustomizationFLUX.1 (dev)
Similarity Score78.3
11
Identity CustomizationQwen-Image
Similarity0.703
8
Reinforcement LearningFLUX.1 dev SRPO protocol v1.0 (test)
Aes6.3119
5
Model DistillationHPS prompts v2
FID15.5
4
Style CustomizationFLUX.1 (dev)
Similarity0.812
4
Style CustomizationQwen-Image
Similarity70.1
4
Model DistillationCOCO 10k prompts
FID6.7
4
Identity CustomizationSDXL
Similarity0.453
2
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