# OuroMamba: A Data-Free Quantization Framework for Vision Mamba

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision Mamba backbones, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 41 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Vision Mamba backbones](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/vision-mamba-backbones/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [BRECQ: Pushing the Limit of Post-Training Quantization by Block Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05426/) (2021)
- [Q-Diffusion: Quantizing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04304/) (2023)
- [LocalMamba: Visual State Space Model with Windowed Selective Scan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09338/) (2024)
- [MambaVision: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08083/) (2024)
- [QServe: W4A8KV4 Quantization and System Co-design for Efficient LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04532/) (2024)
- [PTQ4ViT: Post-training quantization for vision transformers with twin uniform quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12293/) (2021)
- [SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Components for 4-Bit Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05007/) (2024)
- [FQ-ViT: Post-Training Quantization for Fully Quantized Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13824/) (2021)
- [RepQ-ViT: Scale Reparameterization for Post-Training Quantization of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08254/) (2022)
- [ViDiT-Q: Efficient and Accurate Quantization of Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02540/) (2024)
- [Demystify Mamba in Vision: A Linear Attention Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16605/) (2024)
- [Q-DiT: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17343/) (2024)
- [The Hidden Attention of Mamba Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01590/) (2024)
- [ZigMa: A DiT-style Zigzag Mamba Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13802/) (2024)
- [PTQ4DiT: Post-training Quantization for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16005/) (2024)
- [Aligning Latent and Image Spaces to Connect the Unconnectable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06954/) (2021)
- [Patch Similarity Aware Data-Free Quantization for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02250/) (2022)
- [PSAQ-ViT V2: Towards Accurate and General Data-Free Quantization for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05687/) (2022)
- [An Introduction to Image Synthesis with Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04469/) (2018)
- [Quamba: A Post-Training Quantization Recipe for Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13229/) (2024)
- [MicroScopiQ: Accelerating Foundational Models through Outlier-Aware Microscaling Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05282/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Accelerating LLM Inference with Flexible N:M Sparsity via A Fully Digital Compute-in-Memory Accelerator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14365/) (2025)
- [LAWCAT: Efficient Distillation from Quadratic to Linear Attention with Convolution across Tokens for Long Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18467/) (2025)
- [Sequential Token Merging: Revisiting Hidden States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22691/) (2025)
- [ViM-Q: Scalable Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Vision Mamba Model Inference on FPGA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01935/) (2026)
- [Channel-Wise and Token-Aware Post-Training Quantization for Visual State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16656/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present OuroMamba, the first data-free post-training quantization (DFQ) method for vision Mamba-based models (VMMs). We identify two key challenges in enabling DFQ for VMMs, (1) VMM's recurrent state transitions restricts capturing of long-range interactions and leads to semantically weak synthetic data, (2) VMM activations exhibit dynamic outlier variations across time-steps, rendering existing static PTQ techniques ineffective. To address these challenges, OuroMamba presents a two-stage framework: (1) OuroMamba-Gen to generate semantically rich and meaningful synthetic data. It applies contrastive learning on patch level VMM features generated through neighborhood interactions in the latent state space, (2) OuroMamba-Quant to employ mixed-precision quantization with lightweight dynamic outlier detection during inference. In specific, we present a thresholding based outlier channel selection strategy for activations that gets updated every time-step. Extensive experiments across vision and generative tasks show that our data-free OuroMamba surpasses existing data-driven PTQ techniques, achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse quantization settings. Additionally, we implement efficient GPU kernels to achieve practical latency speedup of up to 2.36x. Code and synthetic dataset are available here: https://github.com/georgia-tech-synergy-lab/ICCV-OuroMamba