HGA-Quant: Heterogeneity-Aware Quantization for AutoRegressive Visual Generation Models

Abstract

Recently, AutoRegressive Visual Generation (ARVG) models have emerged as a competitive paradigm for high-quality image synthesis. However, their substantial computational and memory demands make them difficult to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) provides a promising solution to reduce the computational and memory costs of ARVG models, yet existing methods often suffer from substantial image quality degradation under low-bit quantization. In this paper, we propose a training-free PTQ framework for ARVG, consisting of Tail-Aware Bounded-init Grid Refinement (T-BGR) and Coarse-to-Fine Activation Precision Scheduling (CAPS). T-BGR introduces a tail-aware reconstruction objective for weight quantizer calibration, assigning greater importance to distribution-tail coefficients and preserving fine-grained information without introducing additional parameters or high-precision branches. CAPS performs coarse-to-fine activation precision scheduling by jointly considering the importance and computational cost of different generation stages, enabling efficient mixed-precision allocation under a given bit budget. Extensive experiments on multiple ARVG backbones demonstrate that our framework consistently improves robustness under aggressive low-bit quantization. Notably, on Infinity, our framework achieves near full-precision image generation quality at an effective W4A5.6 activation precision, while existing methods at W4A6 still exhibit noticeable quality degradation or inconsistent performance. Code is available at https://github.com/lxm-lc/HGA-Quant.