diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it-OptiQ-4bit

Built with mlx-optiq, the MLX-native toolkit to quantize, fine-tune, and serve LLMs locally on Apple Silicon, no PyTorch and no cloud. Try the Lab · All OptiQ quants · Docs

OptiQ data-driven mixed-precision quant of Google's DiffusionGemma-26B-A4B-it, a block/masked-diffusion LLM (image-text-to-text), the first diffusion model in the OptiQ lineup.

Instead of uniform 4-bit, OptiQ measures each layer's quantization sensitivity — KL on the denoising-canvas logits, sampled across the denoising schedule the model actually walks — and spends an 8-bit budget where the measurement says it matters. The SigLIP vision tower is not quantized at all: it rides at bf16 in a sidecar, so the image path keeps full precision and the entire bit budget goes to the language tower.

247 of 299 language tensors at 8-bit, 52 at 4-bit — 4.685 bits-per-weight. Vision: bf16.

⚠️ Requires mlx-optiq ≥ 0.3.2. DiffusionGemma is not loadable by stock mlx-lm/mlx-vlm; OptiQ ships a vendored, dependency-free decoder for it.

Capability Score

Full 6-metric OptiQ Capability Score (optiq eval --task all --score):

Vision

The vision tower is bf16, so image understanding is not degraded by the quant. Asked to describe four photos in one sentence:

Usage

from optiq.vlm.diffusion_gemma import load, generate

model, tokenizer = load("mlx-community/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it-OptiQ-4bit")

# text
print(generate(model, tokenizer, "Write a haiku about Apple Silicon."))

# image + text
from PIL import Image
print(generate(model, tokenizer, "What is in this image?", images=[Image.open("photo.jpg")]))

Best inference config

DiffusionGemma decodes by iteratively un-masking a fixed 256-token canvas. The sampler choice dominates speed:

OptiQ defaults to confidence-threshold (generate(..., sampler="confidence-threshold")), 4.6–5× faster than the model's default, with no quality loss. On code it's comparable to the autoregressive Gemma-4 26B-A4B (~60 tok/s); on prose it's slower (diffusion's strength is structured/parallel-friendly output).

LoRA fine-tuning

OptiQ ships a diffusion-native LoRA trainer (the model's denoising objective, not autoregressive cross-entropy):

from optiq.vlm.diffusion_gemma.lora import train_diffusion_lora, load_diffusion_lora
train_diffusion_lora(model_path, "data/", "adapter/", rank=8)   # data/train.jsonl: {prompt, completion}
model, tok = load_diffusion_lora(model_path, "adapter/")

Feature support

How it was made

pip install mlx-optiq
optiq convert google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it --target-bpw 4.66 --candidate-bits 4,8

optiq convert detects the diffusion architecture and routes to the masked-canvas pipeline: it builds a uniform-4-bit reference, measures per-layer KL on the denoising-canvas logits (sampled at several points along the denoising schedule, seeded so the sweep is reproducible), runs the greedy-knapsack allocator, and quantizes. The vision/audio towers are excluded from the bit budget and written to optiq/optiq_vision.safetensors at bf16 — a *.safetensors glob does not descend into the subfolder, so third-party loaders ignore the sidecar while OptiQ loads it.

Built with OptiQ. Vendored DiffusionGemma decoder derived from mlx-vlm (MIT).

Quantize your own

pip install mlx-optiq
optiq convert <hf-model-id> --target-bpw 5.0 --candidate-bits 4,8
optiq lab   # full local workbench: chat, compare, quantize, fine-tune