# MixDiT: Accelerating Image Diffusion Transformer Inference With Mixed-Precision MX Quantization

**Authors:** Kim, Hwang, Oh, Park
**Year:** 2025
**DOI:** 10.1109/LCA.2025.3560786
**URL:** https://doi.org/10.1109/LCA.2025.3560786

## Abstract

Diffusion Transformer (DiT) has driven significant progress in image generation tasks. However, DiT inferencing is notoriously compute-intensive and incurs long latency even on datacenter-scale GPUs, primarily due to its iterative nature and heavy reliance on GEMM operations inherent to its encoder-based structure. To address the challenge, prior work has explored quantization, but achieving low-precision quantization for DiT inferencing with both high accuracy and substantial speedup remains an open problem. To this end, this paper proposes MixDiT, an algorithm-hardware co-designed acceleration solution that exploits mixed Microscaling (MX) formats to quantize DiT activation values. MixDiTquantizes the DiT activation tensors by selectively applying higher precision to magnitude-based outliers, which produce mixed-precision GEMM operations. To achieve tangible speedup from the mixed-precision arithmetic, we design a MixDiTaccelerator that enables precision-flexible multiplications and efficient MX precision conversions. Our experimental results show that MixDiTdelivers a speedup of 2.10–5.32× over RTX 3090, with no loss in FID.

## Citation Details

MixDiT: Accelerating Image Diffusion Transformer Inference With Mixed-Precision MX Quantization
**Authors**: Kim, Hwang, Oh, Park
**Year**: 2025
**DOI**: 10.1109/LCA.2025.3560786
**URL**: https://doi.org/10.1109/LCA.2025.3560786

**Abstract**: Diffusion Transformer (DiT) has driven significant progress in image generation tasks. However, DiT inferencing is notoriously compute-intensive and incurs long latency even on datacenter-scale GPUs, primarily due to its iterative nature and heavy reliance on GEMM operations inherent to its encoder-based structure. To address the challenge, prior work has explored quantization, but achieving low-precision quantization for DiT inferencing with both high accuracy and substantial speedup remains an open problem. To this end, this paper proposes MixDiT, an algorithm-hardware co-designed acceleration solution that exploits mixed Microscaling (MX) formats to quantize DiT activation values. MixDiTquantizes the DiT activation tensors by selectively applying higher precision to magnitude-based outliers, which produce mixed-precision GEMM operations. To achieve tangible speedup from the mixed-precision arithmetic, we design a MixDiTaccelerator that enables precision-flexible multiplications and efficient MX precision conversions. Our experimental results show that MixDiTdelivers a speedup of 2.10–5.32× over RTX 3090, with no loss in FID.  # Truncate if very long

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