From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models

Tianwei Yin, Qiang Zhang, Richard Zhang, William T. Freeman, Fredo Durand, Eli Shechtman, Xun Huang; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 22963-22974

Current video diffusion models achieve impressive generation quality but struggle in interactive applications due to bidirectional attention dependencies. The generation of a single frame requires the model to process the entire sequence, including the future. We address this limitation by adapting a pretrained bidirectional diffusion transformer to an autoregressive transformer that generates frames on-the-fly. To further reduce latency, we extend distribution matching distillation (DMD) to videos, distilling 50-step diffusion model into a 4-step generator. To enable stable and high-quality distillation, we introduce a student initialization scheme based on teacher's ODE trajectories, as well as an asymmetric distillation strategy that supervises a causal student model with a bidirectional teacher. This approach effectively mitigates error accumulation in autoregressive generation, allowing long-duration video synthesis despite training on short clips. Our model achieves a total score of 84.27 on the VBench-Long benchmark, surpassing all previous video generation models. It enables fast streaming generation of high-quality videos at 9.4 FPS on a single GPU thanks to KV caching. Our approach also enables streaming video-to-video translation, image-to-video, and dynamic prompting in a zero-shot manner. We release our code and pretrained models.