The transition from weakly damped coherent motion to localization in the context of the spin-boson model has been the subject of numerous studies with distinct behavior depending on the form of the phonon-bath spectral density $J\left(\ensuremath{\omega}\right)\ensuremath{\propto}{\ensuremath{\omega}}^{s}$. Sub-Ohmic (
s<1) and Ohmic (
s=1) spectral densities show a clear localization transition at zero temperature and zero bias, while for super-Ohmic (
s>1) spectral densities this transition disappears. In this paper, we consider the influence of the phonon-bath spectral density on the nonequilibrium dynamics of a quantum dot with electron-phonon interactions described by the extended Holstein model. Using the reduced density matrix formalism combined with the multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree approach, we investigate the dynamic response, the time scales for relaxation, as well as the existence of multiple long-lived solutions as the system-bath coupling changes from the sub- to the super-Ohmic cases. Bistability is shown to diminish for increasing powers of
s similar to the spin-boson case. However, the physical mechanism and the dependence on the model parameters such as the typical bath frequency ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{c}$ and the polaron shift $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ are rather distinct.
With a decomposition scheme for the bath correlation function, the hierarchy equation of motion (HEOM) is extended to the zero-temperature sub-Ohmic spin-boson model, providing a numerically accurate prediction of quantum dynamics. As a dynamic approach, the extended HEOM determines the delocalized-localized (DL) phase transition from the extracted rate kernel and the coherent-incoherent dynamic transition from the short-time oscillation. As the bosonic bath approaches from the strong to weak sub-Ohmic regimes, a crossover behavior is identified for the critical Kondo parameter of the DL transition, accompanied by the transition from the coherent to incoherent dynamics in the localization.