# SemanticDialect: Semantic-Aware Mixed-Format Quantization for Video Diffusion Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02883 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02883/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 44 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00456/) (2024)
- [Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03048/) (2024)
- [InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06942/) (2023)
- [World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15922/) (2026)
- [EvalCrafter: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11440/) (2023)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [SqueezeLLM: Dense-and-Sparse Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07629/) (2023)
- [AMT: All-Pairs Multi-Field Transforms for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09790/) (2023)
- [SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Components for 4-Bit Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05007/) (2024)
- [Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in 200k](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09642/) (2025)
- [Microscaling Data Formats for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10537/) (2023)
- [Towards Understanding Cross and Self-Attention in Stable Diffusion for Text-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03431/) (2024)
- [ConsistI2V: Enhancing Visual Consistency for Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04324/) (2024)
- [ViDiT-Q: Efficient and Accurate Quantization of Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02540/) (2024)
- [Q-DiT: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17343/) (2024)
- [Tag2Text: Guiding Vision-Language Model via Image Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05657/) (2023)
- [PTQ4DiT: Post-training Quantization for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16005/) (2024)
- [DiTCtrl: Exploring Attention Control in Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer for Tuning-Free Multi-Prompt Longer Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18597/) (2024)
- [LLM-FP4: 4-Bit Floating-Point Quantized Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16836/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve state-of-the-art video generation quality, but their substantial memory and computational footprints hinder edge deployment. Quantization can reduce these costs, yet existing methods often degrade video quality due to high activation variation and the difficulty of preserving semantic and temporal coherence. We propose SemanticDialect, which advances block-wise mixed-format quantization. In this framework, each block selects an optimal format (dialect) from a candidate set (formatbook), which is augmented with lookup tables that store quantization errors and quantized indices, enabling efficient per-block format selection and quantization with minimal online overhead. We further introduce attention-guided activation decomposition, which reduces quantization error via residual quantization, and semantic-aware dialect assignment (SeDA), which reduces cross-token quantization inconsistency by enforcing format uniformity among semantically correlated tokens. Experiments demonstrate that SemanticDialect outperforms prior quantization methods and block-wise formats (MXFP4, NVFP4) while approaching FP16 quality on Open-Sora 2.0. We also validate hardware deployability through RTL design and GPU kernel implementation.