Bringing Nunchaku 4-bit Diffusion Inference to Diffusers

Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers Back to Articles

• Table of Contents
• Getting started with Nunchaku Lite
• Background: SVDQuant and Nunchaku
• Introducing Nunchaku Lite
• Native loading in Diffusers- Hardware support
• Getting more speed and lower memory
• Benchmarks- End-to-end latency and memory - Image quality
• Quantizing your own model- 1. Inspect what will be quantized - 2. Run quantization - 3. Package a Diffusers pipeline - 4. Load, verify, and push to the Hub - Quantizing models with structural rewrites
• Ready-to-use checkpoints
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements

Large diffusion transformers can create stunning images (or even videos, audio snippets, and now text), but loading a modern text-to-image model in BF16 precision often requires 20-30 GB of VRAM, which puts these models out of reach of most consumer GPUs. Quantization is a powerful solution to this problem, and Diffusers already integrates several quantization backends such as bitsandbytes, GGUF, torchao, and Quanto, which we covered inExploring Quantization Backends in Diffusers.

Most of these backends areweight-only. This means that they store the weights in low precision and dequantize them back to high precision at compute time. This reduces memory usage significantly, but it usually does not make inference faster, and can even add a small latency overhead.

SVDQuant, the quantization method behind the popularNunchakuinference engine, takes a different approach. It runs the main transformer layers with 4-bit weights and activations (W4A4), reducing memory while also speeding up the denoising loop. The details are covered below, but until now, using these checkpoints required a separate inference library.

With current Diffusers, loading a Nunchaku checkpoint is as simple as callingfrom\_pretrained\(\), with no local CUDA compilation required thanks to thekernelspackage. In addition, the companiondiffuse-compressortoolkit lets you quantize new architectures yourself and publish them as regular Diffusers repositories.

## https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#table-of-contentsTable of Contents

• Getting started with Nunchaku Lite
• Background: SVDQuant and Nunchaku
• Introducing Nunchaku Lite
• Native loading in Diffusers
• Getting more speed and lower memory
• Benchmarks
• Quantizing your own model
• Ready-to-use checkpoints
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#getting-started-with-nunchaku-liteGetting started with Nunchaku Lite

First, install the requirements. You need a recent version of Diffusers and the Hugging Facekernelspackage:

pip install -U diffusers transformers accelerate kernels bitsandbytes

Then load a pre-quantized pipeline like any other Diffusers model:

import torch
from diffusers import ErnieImagePipeline

pipe = ErnieImagePipeline.from_pretrained(
    "lite-infer/ERNIE-Image-Turbo-nunchaku-lite-nvfp4_r32-bnb4-text-encoder",
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
).to("cuda")

image = pipe(
    prompt="A cinematic portrait of a red fox in a misty forest at sunrise, "
           "detailed fur, volumetric light",
    height=1024,
    width=1024,
    num_inference_steps=8,
    guidance_scale=1.0,
    generator=torch.Generator("cuda").manual_seed(42),
).images[0]
image.save("output.png")

No custom pipeline class or separate inference engine is needed, and there is nothing to compile locally. The NVFP4 kernels are downloaded from the Hub through theNunchaku Lite kernels pagethe first time they are used. This checkpoint pairs a Nunchaku NVFP4 transformer with a bitsandbytes NF4 text encoder, and generates a 1024x1024 image in about 1.7 seconds on an RTX 5090 with a peak memory usage of about 12 GB, compared with about 24 GB for the BF16 pipeline. You can find more details about the Nunchaku Lite checkpoint format in theofficial Diffusers documentation.

NVFP4 checkpoints require an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU (RTX 50 series, RTX PRO 6000, B200). For earlier generations, use the INT4 variants. See thehardware supporttable below for details.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#background-svdquant-and-nunchakuBackground: SVDQuant and Nunchaku

SVDQuantis the quantization method behindNunchaku, its reference CUDA inference engine. Standard 4-bit quantization is difficult for diffusion transformers because both weights and activations contain large outliers. SVDQuant handles this by moving activation outliers into the weights, representing the hardest part of each weight matrix with a small 16-bit low-rank branch, and quantizing the remaining residual to 4 bits. Nunchaku makes this fast with fused kernels for the 4-bit path and the low-rank branch.

Nunchaku fuses the low-rank down projection with the quantization kernel and the low-rank up projection with the 4-bit compute kernel, eliminating the memory access overhead of the 16-bit branch. Figure from theSVDQuant paper.## https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#introducing-nunchaku-liteIntroducing Nunchaku Lite

The originalNunchaku enginegets much of its speed frommodel-specific fused execution paths, such as fused QKV projections and fused GELU/MLP kernels. Those optimizations are tied to each architecture’s module layout and checkpoint format, so supporting a new model family usually requires model-specific integration work.

Nunchaku Liteis the new integration path in Diffusers. With it, Diffusers can load Nunchaku-style checkpoints without a custom pipeline or a separate inference engine. Under the hood, Nunchaku Lite patches the relevantnn\.Linearmodules of a stock Diffusers model with runtime SVDQ/AWQ linear layers before the checkpoint is loaded. The CUDA kernels come from the Hub through thekernelspackage. Two kernel families are used:

• svdq\_w4a4: 4-bit weights and activations with the SVDQuant low-rank correction. This layer is used for the transformer’s attention and MLP projections, where nearly all of the compute is spent, and is available in INT4 and NVFP4 variants.
• awq\_w4a16: 4-bit weights with 16-bit activations, used for adaptive normalization and modulation projections such as FLUXadanorm\_single/adanorm\_zeroor Qwen-Image modulation layers. These layers are memory-bound and precision-sensitive, making AWQ a good fit to preserve precision while still saving memory and space.

The trade-off is that, without architecture-specific fused kernels and modules, Nunchaku Lite cannot match the speedup of the original Nunchaku engine. However, the bare-bones implementation still delivers around30% speedupwhile retaining the same level ofVRAM reduction.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#native-loading-in-diffusersNative loading in Diffusers

If you have used bitsandbytes or torchao in Diffusers, the mechanics will feel familiar. A Nunchaku Lite model repository is an ordinary Diffusers repository. The only special part is aquantization\_configblock inside the transformer’sconfig\.json:

"quantization_config": {
    "quant_method": "nunchaku_lite",
    "compute_dtype": "bfloat16",
    "svdq_w4a4": {
        "precision": "nvfp4",
        "group_size": 16,
        "rank": 32,
        "targets": [
            "layers.0.self_attention.to_q",
            "layers.0.self_attention.to_k",
            "..."
        ]
    },
    "awq_w4a16": {
        "precision": "int4",
        "group_size": 64,
        "targets": [
            "adaLN_modulation.1",
            "..."
        ]
    }
}

This config tells Diffusers which modules were quantized, which scheme they use, and which Nunchaku Lite runtime layer to instantiate (SVDQW4A4LinearorAWQW4A16Linear).

Because the quantized model keeps the exact module structure of the dense one, everything downstream (schedulers, LoRA loading hooks, offloading,torch\.compile) sees a normal Diffusers model.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#hardware-supportHardware support

Nunchaku Lite uses different kernel variants depending on the GPU generation and checkpoint precision:

SchemePrecisionSupported GPUssvdq\_w4a4``nvfp4Blackwell (RTX 50 series, RTX PRO 6000, B200)svdq\_w4a4``int4Turing / Ampere / Ada (RTX 30 & 40 series, A100, L40S)awq\_w4a16``int4Turing / Ampere / Ada (RTX 30 & 40 series, A100, L40S)

Volta and Hopper GPUs are currently not supported by the 4-bit kernels. The quantizer validates the GPU’s CUDA capability at load time and raises a clear error instead of producing incorrect outputs.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#getting-more-speed-and-lower-memoryGetting more speed and lower memory

Nunchaku Lite can be combined with other Diffusers memory and speed optimizations.

**torch\.compile.**Compiling the transformer improves the end-to-end speedup from 1.35x to 1.8x:

pipe.transformer.compile(fullgraph=True)

# or compile_repeated_blocks() for faster compilation

pipe.transformer.compile_repeated_blocks(fullgraph=True)

**Quantized text encoders.**The transformer is not the only component with a large memory footprint. Text encoders such as T5 or Qwen3 can occupy several gigabytes on their own. Further quantizing the text encoder with bitsandbytes NF4 reduces peak VRAM by about 22% in our benchmark.

**Offloading.**Diffusers offloading helpers such asenable\_model\_cpu\_offload\(\)andenable\_sequential\_cpu\_offload\(\)work as usual if you need to fit the pipeline onto a smaller GPU.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#benchmarksBenchmarks

All numbers below were measured on an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 (Blackwell) at 1024x1024 usingrootonchair/ERNIE-Image-Turbo-nunchaku-lite-int4-bnb4-text-encoder.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#end-to-end-latency-and-memoryEnd-to-end latency and memory

ConfigurationFull pipelineDenoise loopPeak VRAMSpeedupBF16 baseline3.00 s2.86 s31.1 GB1.0xNunchaku Lite NVFP42.27 s2.13 s20.6 GB1.35xNunchaku Lite NVFP4 +torch\.compile1.68 s1.53 s20.6 GB1.8xNunchaku Lite NVFP4 + NF4 text encoder2.29 s2.13 s16.0 GB1.35x As shown above, Nunchaku reduces peak VRAM by up to 50% while still improving latency by roughly 30%. The remaining overhead comes largely from extra kernel launches, whichtorch\.compilecan mitigate, bringing the full pipeline down to 1.68 s, or 1.8x faster than the BF16 baseline.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#image-qualityImage quality

BF16 vs 4-bit outputs with identical seeds and settings.## https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#quantizing-your-own-modelQuantizing your own model

Nunchaku Lite support in Diffusers is architecture-agnostic, and thediffuse-compressortoolkit provides an end-to-end SVDQuant workflow for Diffusers models: calibrate, quantize, package, and publish.

Below, we walk through quantizing FLUX.2 Klein 4B as an example. It covers the main steps: inspect the model, calibrate and quantize the transformer, package the result as a Diffusers pipeline, then verify and push it to the Hub. Thefull tutorialcovers every flag in detail.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#1-inspect-what-will-be-quantized1. Inspect what will be quantized

The generic scanner walks the model and decides what to target: compatible linears inside the repeated transformer-block stack become SVDQ W4A4 targets, recognized modulation linears become AWQ W4A16 targets, and everything else stays dense.

python examples/text_to_image/quantize_hf.py black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-klein-4B \
  --precision int4 --rank 32 --inspect-config

Always read this report before quantizing. For FLUX.2 Klein 4B, the expected result is 100 SVDQ targets, 3 AWQ targets, and 6 dense outer linears, with no missing patterns or duplicate names.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#2-run-quantization2. Run quantization

The following command runs SVDQuant on the transformer and writes the quantized checkpoint tooutputs/checkpoints/svdq\-int4\_r32\-flux\-2\-klein\-4b\.safetensors:

python examples/text_to_image/quantize_hf.py black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-klein-4B \
  --precision int4 \
  --output outputs/checkpoints/svdq-int4_r32-flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors

Replace\-\-precision int4withnvfp4to build Blackwell-native weights.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#3-package-a-diffusers-pipeline3. Package a Diffusers pipeline

The converter combines the quantized transformer with the base pipeline’s other components, writes the compactnunchaku\_liteconfiguration intotransformer/config\.json, and can optionally convert text encoders to NF4:

python examples/convert_nunchaku_lite_diffusers.py \
  --checkpoint outputs/checkpoints/svdq-int4_r32-flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors \
  --model-id black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-klein-4B \
  --bnb4-text-encoder text_encoder \
  --compute-dtype bfloat16 \
  --output-dir outputs/diffusers/FLUX.2-klein-4B-nunchaku-lite-int4-bnb4-text-encoder

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#4-load-verify-and-push-to-the-hub4. Load, verify, and push to the Hub

import torch
from diffusers import DiffusionPipeline

pipe = DiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(
    "outputs/diffusers/FLUX.2-klein-4B-nunchaku-lite-int4-bnb4-text-encoder",
    device_map="cuda",
)
image = pipe(
    "A glass robot in a greenhouse, cinematic lighting",
    num_inference_steps=4, guidance_scale=1.0,
    generator=torch.Generator("cuda").manual_seed(12345),
).images[0]

Once the outputs look good, runpipe\.push\_to\_hub\("your\-name/your\-model\-nunchaku\-lite\-int4"\). Other users can then load it with the samefrom\_pretrained\(\)pattern shown above.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#quantizing-models-with-structural-rewritesQuantizing models with structural rewrites

Note that the generic path assumes the architecture can be quantized without structural rewrites. For additional speedup, the original Nunchaku engine rewrites groups of Diffusers layers as fused modules. The generic path cannot infer these changes on its own, such as combining separate Q, K, and V projections into one module or splitting a fused projection across several modules.

FLUX.1-dev’s QKV projection is a concrete example.Diffusers defines three separate modules:

self.to_q = torch.nn.Linear(query_dim, self.inner_dim, bias=bias)
self.to_k = torch.nn.Linear(query_dim, self.inner_dim, bias=bias)
self.to_v = torch.nn.Linear(query_dim, self.inner_dim, bias=bias)

TheNunchaku FLUX module combines those layersinto one quantizedto\_qkvmodule:

to_qkv = fuse_linears([other.to_q, other.to_k, other.to_v])
self.to_qkv = SVDQW4A4Linear.from_linear(to_qkv, **kwargs)

This grouped module is required because Nunchaku’s fused operator consumes the QKV projection, Q/K normalization, and rotary embeddings together. By comparison, thedefault Diffusers pathexecutes them separately:

query = attn.to_q(hidden_states)
key = attn.to_k(hidden_states)
value = attn.to_v(hidden_states)

query = query.unflatten(-1, (attn.heads, -1))
key = key.unflatten(-1, (attn.heads, -1))
value = value.unflatten(-1, (attn.heads, -1))

query = attn.norm_q(query)
key = attn.norm_k(key)

if image_rotary_emb is not None:
    query = apply_rotary_emb(query, image_rotary_emb, sequence_dim=1)
    key = apply_rotary_emb(key, image_rotary_emb, sequence_dim=1)

TheNunchaku pathsupplies the grouped projection, normalization modules, and rotary embeddings to one fused operator:

qkv = fused_qkv_norm_rottary(
    hidden_states, attn.to_qkv, attn.norm_q, attn.norm_k, image_rotary_emb
)

This is the structural rewrite that the generic path cannot infer. Diffusers has three destination modules withto\_q,to\_k, andto\_vparameter prefixes, while Nunchaku has one grouped module underto\_qkv. A model-specific target config or adapter must state that the Q, K, and V parameters should be concatenated along the output dimension, in that order, and loaded intoto\_qkv.

Structural rewrites like these are described by a model-specific target config during quantization and handled by a small runtime adapter when the checkpoint is loaded. TheFLUX.2 Klein 4B quantization scriptprovides a concrete target-config example for producing a structurally rewritten checkpoint, whilerootonchair/nunchaku-liteprovides the runtime adapters needed to load grouped QKV tensors, split fused projections, and other fused operations. For the complete workflow, you can check theAdding A New Modelguide.

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#ready-to-use-checkpointsReady-to-use checkpoints

To get started right away, check out the following repositories:

• rootonchair/ERNIE-Image-Turbo-nunchaku-lite-int4-bnb4-text-encoder: INT4 ERNIE-Image-Turbo with a bitsandbytes NF4 text encoder
• rootonchair/ERNIE-Image-Turbo-nunchaku-lite-nvfp4-bnb4-text-encoder: NVFP4 ERNIE-Image-Turbo with a bitsandbytes NF4 text encoder
• OzzyGT/Krea_2_Turbo_nunchaku_lite_nvfp4: NVFP4 Krea 2 Turbo checkpoint
• lite-infer: more Nunchaku Lite checkpoints and collections

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#conclusionConclusion

Nunchaku’s SVDQuant kernels are one of the most effective ways to run diffusion transformers efficiently on consumer hardware, and they are now natively supported in Diffusers. Pre-quantized checkpoints load withfrom\_pretrained\(\), and the diffuse-compressor toolkit makes it possible to quantize new architectures without waiting for engine support. By quantizing both weights and activations, the W4A4 path lowers memory use while improving denoising latency, keeping image quality close to the BF16 original.

If you quantize and publish a new model, we would love to hear about it. Share it on the Hub and let us know! If you have any questions about this feature, feel free to join ourDiscord.

To learn more, check out the following resources:

• Diffusers Nunchaku documentation
• The integration PR (huggingface/diffusers#14100)
• SVDQuant paperand theNunchaku engine
• diffuse-compressor
• Previous posts:Exploring Quantization Backends in DiffusersandMemory-efficient Diffusion Transformers with Quanto and Diffusers

https://huggingface.co/blog/nunchaku-diffusers#acknowledgementsAcknowledgements

Thanks to the Diffusers maintainers for reviews and guidance throughout the integration, and to the MIT HAN Lab / Nunchaku team for the original SVDQuant work. Thanks to Marc Sun for providing feedback on the blog post. Thanks to Álvaro Somoza for trying outnunchaku\-liteand for providing feedback.

rootonchairis also grateful to SilverAI for supporting this work and providing the environment in which much of this development took place.