

Nunchaku is a high-performance inference engine optimized for 4-bit neural networks, as introduced in our paper SVDQuant. For the underlying quantization library, check out DeepCompressor.
Join our user groups on Discord and WeChat to engage in discussions with the community! More details can be found here. If you have any questions, run into issues, or are interested in contributing, don’t hesitate to reach out!
News
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- [2025-09-09] 🔥 Released 4-bit Qwen-Image-Edit together with the 4/8-step Lightning variants! Models are available on Hugging Face. Try them out with our example script.
- [2025-09-04] 🚀 Official release of Nunchaku v1.0.0! Qwen-Image now supports asynchronous offloading, reducing VRAM usage to as little as 3 GiB with no performance loss. Check out the tutorial to get started.
- [2025-08-27] 🔥 Release 4-bit 4/8-step lightning Qwen-Image! Download on Hugging Face or ModelScope, and try it with our example script.
- [2025-08-15] 🔥 Our 4-bit Qwen-Image models are now live on Hugging Face! Get started with our example script. ComfyUI, LoRA, and CPU offloading support are coming soon!
- [2025-08-15] 🚀 The Python backend is now available! Explore our Pythonic FLUX models here and see the modular 4-bit linear layer here.
- [2025-07-31] 🚀 FLUX.1-Krea-dev is now supported! Check out our new example script to get started.
- [2025-07-13] 🚀 The official Nunchaku documentation is now live! Explore comprehensive guides and resources to help you get started.
- [2025-06-29] 🔥 Support FLUX.1-Kontext! Try out our example script to see it in action! Our demo is available at this link!
- [2025-06-01] 🚀 Release v0.3.0! This update adds support for multiple-batch inference, ControlNet-Union-Pro 2.0, initial integration of PuLID, and introduces Double FB Cache. You can now load Nunchaku FLUX models as a single file, and our upgraded 4-bit T5 encoder now matches FP8 T5 in quality!
- [2025-04-16] 🎥 Released tutorial videos in both English and Chinese to assist installation and usage.
- [2025-04-09] 📢 Published the April roadmap and an FAQ to help the community get started and stay up to date with Nunchaku’s development.
- [2025-04-05] 🚀 Nunchaku v0.2.0 released! This release brings multi-LoRA and ControlNet support with even faster performance powered by FP16 attention and First-Block Cache. We've also added compatibility for 20-series GPUs — Nunchaku is now more accessible than ever!
- [2025-03-07] 🚀 Nunchaku v0.1.4 Released! We've supported 4-bit text encoder and per-layer CPU offloading, reducing FLUX's minimum memory requirement to just 4 GiB while maintaining a 2–3× speedup. This update also fixes various issues related to resolution, LoRA, pin memory, and runtime stability. Check out the release notes for full details!
- [2025-02-20] 🚀 Support NVFP4 precision on NVIDIA RTX 5090! NVFP4 delivers superior image quality compared to INT4, offering ~3× speedup on the RTX 5090 over BF16. Learn more in our blog, checkout
examples for usage and try our demo online!
- [2025-02-18] 🔥 Customized LoRA conversion and model quantization instructions are now available! ComfyUI workflows now support customized LoRA, along with FLUX.1-Tools!
- [2025-02-11] 🎉 SVDQuant has been selected as a ICLR 2025 Spotlight! FLUX.1-tools Gradio demos are now available! Check here for the usage details! Our new depth-to-image demo is also online—try it out!
- [2025-02-04] 🚀 4-bit FLUX.1-tools is here! Enjoy a 2-3× speedup over the original models. Check out the examples for usage. ComfyUI integration is coming soon!
- [2025-01-23] 🚀 4-bit SANA support is here! Experience a 2-3× speedup compared to the 16-bit model. Check out the usage example and the deployment guide for more details. Explore our live demo at svdquant.mit.edu!
- [2025-01-22] 🎉 SVDQuant has been accepted to ICLR 2025!
- [2024-12-08] Support ComfyUI. Please check ComfyUI-nunchaku for the usage.
- [2024-11-07] 🔥 Our latest W4A4 Diffusion model quantization work SVDQuant is publicly released! Check DeepCompressor for the quantization library.
Overview
Nunchaku is a high-performance inference engine for low-bit neural networks. It implements SVDQuant, a post-training quantization technique for 4-bit weights and activations that well maintains visual fidelity. On 12B FLUX.1-dev, it achieves 3.6× memory reduction compared to the BF16 model. By eliminating CPU offloading, it offers 8.7× speedup over the 16-bit model when on a 16GB laptop 4090 GPU, 3× faster than the NF4 W4A16 baseline. On PixArt-∑, it demonstrates significantly superior visual quality over other W4A4 or even W4A8 baselines. "E2E" means the end-to-end latency including the text encoder and VAE decoder.
SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Components for 4-Bit Diffusion Models
Muyang Li*, Yujun Lin*, Zhekai Zhang*, Tianle Cai, Xiuyu Li, Junxian Guo, Enze Xie, Chenlin Meng, Jun-Yan Zhu, and Song Han
MIT, NVIDIA, CMU, Princeton, UC Berkeley, SJTU, and Pika Labs
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fdd4ab68-6489-4c65-8768-259bd866e8f8
Method
Quantization Method -- SVDQuant
Overview of SVDQuant. Stage1: Originally, both the activation $\boldsymbol{X}$ and weights $\boldsymbol{W}$ contain outliers, making 4-bit quantization challenging. Stage 2: We migrate the outliers from activations to weights, resulting in the updated activation $\hat{\boldsymbol{X}}$ and weights $\hat{\boldsymbol{W}}$. While $\hat{\boldsymbol{X}}$ becomes easier to quantize, $\hat{\boldsymbol{W}}$ now becomes more difficult. Stage 3: SVDQuant further decomposes $\hat{\boldsymbol{W}}$ into a low-rank component $\boldsymbol{L}_1\boldsymbol{L}_2$ and a residual $\hat{\boldsymbol{W}}-\boldsymbol{L}_1\boldsymbol{L}_2$ with SVD. Thus, the quantization difficulty is alleviated by the low-rank branch, which runs at 16-bit precision.
Nunchaku Engine Design
(a) Naïvely running low-rank branch with rank 32 will introduce 57% latency overhead due to extra read of 16-bit inputs in Down Projection and extra write of 16-bit outputs in Up Projection. Nunchaku optimizes this overhead with kernel fusion. (b) Down Projection and Quantize kernels use the same input, while Up Projection and 4-Bit Compute kernels share the same output. To reduce data movement overhead, we fuse the first two and the latter two kernels together.
Performance
SVDQuant reduces the 12B FLUX.1 model size by 3.6× and cuts the 16-bit model's memory usage by 3.5×. With Nunchaku, our INT4 model runs 3.0× faster than the NF4 W4A16 baseline on both desktop and laptop NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPUs. Notably, on the laptop 4090, it achieves a total 10.1× speedup by eliminating CPU offloading. Our NVFP4 model is also 3.1× faster than both BF16 and NF4 on the RTX 5090 GPU.
Getting Started