# DFQ-ViT: Data-Free Quantization for Vision Transformers without Fine-tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14481 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14481/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SparseGPT: Massive Language Models Can Be Accurately Pruned in One-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00774/) (2023)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [KVQuant: Towards 10 Million Context Length LLM Inference with KV Cache Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18079/) (2024)
- [DoReFa-Net: Training Low Bitwidth Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Bitwidth Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06160/) (2016)
- [Quantizing deep convolutional networks for efficient inference: A whitepaper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08342/) (2018)
- [On The Power of Curriculum Learning in Training Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03626/) (2019)
- [Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14156/) (2021)
- [ZeroQ: A Novel Zero Shot Quantization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00281/) (2020)
- [Automated Curriculum Learning for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03003/) (2017)
- [TinyViT: Fast Pretraining Distillation for Small Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10666/) (2022)
- [Ternary Weight Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04711/) (2016)
- [FQ-ViT: Post-Training Quantization for Fully Quantized Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13824/) (2021)
- [Q-ViT: Accurate and Fully Quantized Low-bit Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06707/) (2022)
- [Generative Low-bitwidth Data Free Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03603/) (2020)
- [Global Vision Transformer Pruning with Hessian-Aware Saliency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04869/) (2021)
- [Diversifying Sample Generation for Accurate Data-Free Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01049/) (2021)
- [Selective Reflection-Tuning: Student-Selected Data Recycling for LLM Instruction-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10110/) (2024)
- [Patch Similarity Aware Data-Free Quantization for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02250/) (2022)
- [IntraQ: Learning Synthetic Images with Intra-Class Heterogeneity for Zero-Shot Network Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09136/) (2021)
- [PSAQ-ViT V2: Towards Accurate and General Data-Free Quantization for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05687/) (2022)
- [A Unified Pruning Framework for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15127/) (2021)
- [Dataset Distillation via Curriculum Data Synthesis in Large Data Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18838/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LetheViT: Selective Machine Unlearning for Vision Transformers via Attention-Guided Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01569/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Quantization via Weight-Space Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03420/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data-Free Quantization (DFQ) enables the quantization of Vision Transformers (ViTs) without requiring access to data, allowing for the deployment of ViTs on devices with limited resources. In DFQ, the quantization model must be calibrated using synthetic samples, making the quality of these synthetic samples crucial. Existing methods fail to fully capture and balance the global and local features within the samples, resulting in limited synthetic data quality. Moreover, we have found that during inference, there is a significant difference in the distributions of intermediate layer activations between the quantized and full-precision models. These issues lead to a severe performance degradation of the quantized model. To address these problems, we propose a pipeline for Data-Free Quantization for Vision Transformers (DFQ-ViT). Specifically, we synthesize samples in order of increasing difficulty, effectively enhancing the quality of synthetic data. During the calibration and inference stage, we introduce the activation correction matrix for the quantized model to align the intermediate layer activations with those of the full-precision model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DFQ-ViT achieves remarkable superiority over existing DFQ methods and its performance is on par with models quantized through real data. For example, the performance of DeiT-T with 3-bit weights quantization is 4.29% higher than the state-of-the-art. Our method eliminates the need for fine-tuning, which not only reduces computational overhead but also lowers the deployment barriers for edge devices. This characteristic aligns with the principles of Green Learning by improving energy efficiency and facilitating real-world applications in resource-constrained environments.