# TerDiT: Ternary Diffusion Models with Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14854 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14854/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 53 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07339/) (2022)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08740/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Q-VDiT: Towards Accurate Quantization and Distillation of Video-Generation Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22167/) (2025)
- [DVD-Quant: Data-free Video Diffusion Transformers Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18663/) (2025)
- [Agentic World Modeling: Foundations, Capabilities, Laws, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22748/) (2026)
- [S2Q-VDiT: Accurate Quantized Video Diffusion Transformer with Salient Data and Sparse Token Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04016/) (2025)
- [PT2-LLM: Post-Training Ternarization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03267/) (2025)
- [Q&C: When Quantization Meets Cache in Efficient Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02508/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent developments in large-scale pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models have significantly improved the generation of high-fidelity images, particularly with the emergence of diffusion transformer models (DiTs). Among diffusion models, diffusion transformers have demonstrated superior image-generation capabilities, boosting lower FID scores and higher scalability. However, deploying large-scale DiT models can be expensive due to their excessive parameter numbers. Although existing research has explored efficient deployment techniques for diffusion models, such as model quantization, there is still little work concerning DiT-based models. To tackle this research gap, we propose TerDiT, the first quantization-aware training (QAT) and efficient deployment scheme for extremely low-bit diffusion transformer models. We focus on the ternarization of DiT networks, with model sizes ranging from 600M to 4.2B, and image resolution from 256×256 to 512×512. Our work contributes to the exploration of efficient deployment of large-scale DiT models, demonstrating the feasibility of training extremely low-bit DiT models from scratch while maintaining competitive image generation capacities compared to full-precision models. Our code and pre-trained TerDiT checkpoints have been released at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/TerDiT.