BinaryAttention: One-Bit Attention for Vision and Diffusion Transformers

Transformers have achieved widespread and remarkable success, while the computational complexity of their attention modules remains a major bottleneck for vision tasks. Existing methods mainly employ 8-bit or 4-bit quantization to balance efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, with theoretical justification, we indicate that binarization of attention preserves the essential similarity relationships, and propose BinaryAttention, an effective method for fast and accurate 1-bit attention. Specifically, we retain only the sign of queries and keys in computing the attention, and replace the floating dot products with bit-wise operations, significantly reducing the computational cost. We mitigate the inherent information loss under 1-bit quantization by incorporating a learnable bias, and enable end-to-end acceleration. To maintain the accuracy of attention, we adopt quantization-aware training and self-distillation techniques, mitigating quantization errors while ensuring sign-aligned similarity. BinaryAttention is more than 2$\times$ faster than FlashAttention2 on A100 GPUs. Extensive experiments on vision transformer and diffusion transformer benchmarks demonstrate that BinaryAttention matches or even exceeds full-precision attention, validating its effectiveness. Our work provides a highly efficient and effective alternative to full-precision attention, pushing the frontier of low-bit transformers for vision tasks. The codes and models will be made publicly available.