# Error Propagation Mechanisms and Compensation Strategies for Quantized Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12094 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12094/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 37 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [Understanding Diffusion Models: A Unified Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11970/) (2022)
- [PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04692/) (2024)
- [Q-Diffusion: Quantizing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04304/) (2023)
- [ZeroQ: A Novel Zero Shot Quantization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00281/) (2020)
- [Post-training Quantization on Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15736/) (2022)
- [Playground v2.5: Three Insights towards Enhancing Aesthetic Quality in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17245/) (2024)
- [LSQ+: Improving low-bit quantization through learnable offsets and better initialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09576/) (2020)
- [PTQD: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10657/) (2023)
- [SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Components for 4-Bit Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05007/) (2024)
- [UNIT-DDPM: UNpaired Image Translation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05358/) (2021)
- [ConsistI2V: Enhancing Visual Consistency for Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04324/) (2024)
- [One-Step Image Translation with Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12036/) (2024)
- [ViDiT-Q: Efficient and Accurate Quantization of Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02540/) (2024)
- [A Picture is Worth More Than 77 Text Tokens: Evaluating CLIP-Style Models on Dense Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08578/) (2023)
- [PTQ4DiT: Post-training Quantization for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16005/) (2024)
- [TFMQ-DM: Temporal Feature Maintenance Quantization for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16503/) (2023)
- [EasyQuant: Post-training Quantization via Scale Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16669/) (2020)

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

- [S2O: Early Stopping for Sparse Attention via Online Permutation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22575/) (2026)
- [TMPDiff: Temporal Mixed-Precision for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14062/) (2026)
- [TASQ: Temporal-Adaptive Bit Sparsification Quantization for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03057/) (2026)
- [Post-training Quantization for Hybrid Iterative Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13932/) (2026)
- [Quantization-Aware Kalman Estimation for Diffusion Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21407/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have transformed image synthesis by establishing unprecedented quality and creativity benchmarks. Nevertheless, their large-scale deployment faces challenges due to computationally intensive iterative denoising processes. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) provides an effective pathway for accelerating sampling, the iterative nature of diffusion models causes stepwise quantization errors to accumulate progressively during generation, inevitably compromising output fidelity. To address this challenge, we develop a theoretical framework that mathematically formulates error propagation in Diffusion Models (DMs), deriving per-step quantization error propagation equations and establishing the first closed-form solution for cumulative error. Building on this theoretical foundation, we propose a timestep-aware cumulative error compensation scheme. Extensive experiments on multiple image datasets demonstrate that our compensation strategy effectively mitigates error propagation, significantly enhancing existing PTQ methods. Specifically, it achieves a 1.2 PSNR improvement over SVDQuant on SDXL W4A4, while incurring only an additional < 0.5% time overhead.