Papers for
video content creators
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Bilibili weekly picks dataset links videos with comments and covers
BiliPicks: Seven Years of Weekly Platform Curation on Bilibili with Video Metadata, Comments, and Danmaku
Abstract: BiliPicks documents seven years of Bilibili's Weekly Picks, a platform-curated editorial video series. The dataset covers 371 publicly listed issues and 13,758 curated videos from 22 March 2019 to 7 May 2026. It links issue dates, themes and editorial recommendations to video metadata, 47,799,657 top-level comments, 125,690,760 time-synchronised overlay comments (danmaku), and 13,739 cover images. Weekly issues provide a consistent unit for tracing changes in category composition, recurring creators and editorial framing. Corresponding comments and danmaku connect video-level discussion with audience expressions tied to particular moments, while covers add a visual dimension. We evaluate retrieval coverage and illustrate longitudinal analyses of selection, audience language and cover presentation. BiliPicks provides a dataset for future studies of platform curation, linking changes in published selections to their editorial framing and corresponding audience engagement.
BoxWorld separates interaction rules from video rendering for real-time control
BoxWorld: Let World Engines Control and Video Generators Render
Abstract: We tackle the challenge of building real-time interactive video worlds with user-defined behaviors. Such worlds must track object states, apply interaction rules, and render the resulting consequences as users act. Yet existing end-to-end video world models typically learn interaction dynamics within the generator, making it difficult to specify object-level rules and reason about their consequences. In this work, we introduce BoxWorld, which separates interaction reasoning from generative rendering. Given user-specified rules, a coding agent creates a Box World Engine that determines interaction outcomes and exposes the resulting object states through a lightweight interface of layout boxes, persistent object attributes, and dynamic status variables, leaving appearance and physical effects to generative rendering. A Box-State Generative Renderer then renders this evolving state stream into video autoregressively, enabling online control over object motion, state switches, and conditional events. Rendering this state stream is non-trivial: the renderer must respond to object-level state updates in real time while remaining coherent with the generated history. To this end, we introduce a three-stage training strategy that learns object grounding from open-domain videos and state transitions from gameplay videos, both annotated automatically, and finally performs rollout distillation on self-generated histories. We further propose PairedStateBench, a paired benchmark for fine-grained interaction control. BoxWorld substantially outperforms end-to-end world models and remains competitive across multiple public benchmarks. Project page: https://boxworld-web.github.io.
Uni voe enables better video object removal and insertion with interaction effects
UniVOE: A Removal-Driven Framework for Interaction-Aware Universal Video Object Editing
Abstract: Video object removal and injection are reciprocal editing operations between object-present and object-absent video states, yet they differ substantially in training difficulty. Removal can be effectively bootstrapped from video inpainting and further adapted to erase object-related interaction effects. Injection, however, requires large-scale paired supervision to model object appearance, dynamics, and scene-dependent effects, while perfectly aligned real-world pairs are difficult to collect and synthetic data lacks sufficient realism and diversity. To address this challenge, we present UniVOE, a removal-driven framework for training both video object removal and injection models. We first train an effect-aware remover by transferring video inpainting priors and finetuning on object-present/object-absent pairs. The trained remover converts real object-present videos into object-absent counterparts, creating large-scale paired supervision for injection. An injection model is trained on these pairs in the reverse direction to recover objects together with their dynamics and interaction effects. Moreover, since pixel-level reconstruction alone cannot adequately capture perceptual realism, we introduce a reward-based post-training method that aligns injection results with human preferences using a proprietary reward model. Experiments against strong open-source and commercial systems demonstrate that UniVOE achieves state-of-the-art performance on both object removal and injection, particularly in challenging interaction-effect cases.
Multi-agent planning improves physics in text to video generation
PhyEvolve: Multi-Agent State-Evolution Planning for Physics-Aware Video Generation
Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-video generation have substantially improved visual fidelity, yet existing models still struggle to understand the physical evolution implicit in user prompts, making it difficult to generate videos with continuous physical state evolution. Here, we propose PhyEvolve, a multi-agent framework that enhances natural-language prompts through structured state-evolution planning. PhyEvolve consists of three agents: a Director, a Physical Evolver, and a Composer. Given a user prompt and an optional first frame, the Director grounds the scene and disentangles physical events from observation changes. The Physical Evolver uses scene evidence to identify physical mechanisms then constructs causally linked state transitions that unfold throughout the video, whether visible or not. The Composer utilizes these transitions to enhance the original prompts. Without retraining or model modification, PhyEvolve works directly with existing generators through prompt replacement. Extensive experiments on four major benchmarks show that PhyEvolve achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the cutting-edge prior agentic baseline by 7.9 percentage points on average. These results demonstrate that explicit causal state-evolution planning improves physical consistency and state continuity in generated videos through natural-language prompt enhancement.
HeyGen Voice clones voices with matching scene sounds
HeyGen Voice: Scene-Aware Voice Cloning for Talking Videos
Abstract: Most voice-cloning systems are built for audio alone: they copy the reference recording's delivery and acoustics, so a voice cloned on a phone sounds like a phone recording whether the speaker is pictured in a studio, on a street, or in a cathedral. Speech for a talking video should sound like the pictured person speaking in the pictured place. We present HeyGen Voice, a scene-aware voice-cloning model that separates who is speaking from how and where: it keeps the speaker's voice from an everyday recording while the target image sets the delivery and acoustics. Prior image-conditioned TTS does half of this job: it either adds scene acoustics without keeping a specific speaker or infers a voice from a face. HeyGen Voice is a multimodal autoregressive transformer conditioned on the image, speaker and scene captions, and the voice recording, trained in five stages that move from multilingual TTS pretraining through simulated and real cross-scene adaptation to reinforcement and preference optimization. Two clone policies trade scene adaptation against fidelity to the original recording, and an audio anchor holds long scripts in one voice and one acoustic environment. Listeners prefer HeyGen Voice over leading commercial systems across a third-party arena, production votes, and talking-video studies: it ranks first (Elo 1201) on the public Artificial Analysis controlled-voice TTS leaderboard (October 2026); in a blind test, users cloning their own voice chose it over ElevenLabs v4 and Cartesia Sonic 3.6 in 62% and 54% of votes; and volunteers rated talking videos of their own digital twin about 10 to 30 points higher (out of 100) when voiced by HeyGen Voice than by leading commercial alternatives. Try HeyGen Voice and hear samples at https://heygen.com/heygen-voice.
Video generation models improved for steady camera movement
CausalAlign: Causal Alignment of Video Generation Models for Consistent Ego-Motion
Abstract: Diffusion-based video generation models (VGMs) can produce visually plausible videos, yet their camera ego-motion often drifts over long horizons. Camera ego-motion determines how the viewpoint changes between frames and is essential for maintaining consistent geometry and trajectories. To address this problem, we propose CausalAlign, a causal alignment framework with two components. First, we diagnose how precise ego motion is represented, used, and retained within VGMs using linear probes and causal interventions, revealing a rise-and-fall pattern during denoising. Second, we strengthen ego-motion state in VGM by aligning the representations at the identified layers to a 3D foundation model through delta-token space. This space encodes the changes between consecutive frames, allowing the alignment to focus on ego-motion dynamics rather than static scene content. With Wan2.2 fine-tuned on DL3DV and RealEstate10K, CausalAlign can largely improve motion accuracy, geometric consistency, and temporal smoothness, while preserving visual quality. For example, it improves geometric consistency by more than 20% relative to the base model. Moreover, with the fine-tuned VGM, CausalAlign improves the success rate of world action models (WAMs) by 10 points on mobile manipulation tasks of RoboCasa365 benchmark. Overall, CausalAlign improves ego-motion consistency in diffusion-based VGMs and yields noticeable gains in embodied models.
Video captioning system requests targeted observations for accuracy
OACap: Caption-Guided Active Observation for Detailed Video Captioning
Abstract: Unlike question answering, where a query specifies a perceptual target, open-ended detailed captioning must determine what evidence to acquire and how to integrate it into a coherent global description. We propose Observation-Adaptive Video Captioner (OACap), a caption-centered agent that turns unsupported or missing information into targeted observation requests, uses spatiotemporal tools to acquire evidence, and iteratively verifies and revises the caption. OACap captions consistently improve performance across general video-understanding benchmarks using a fixed text-only reader. To better diagnose the information they preserve, we introduce Factual-Semantic Captioning Bench (FSCap-Bench). Its Core-Support Factuality Score (CSFS) combines claim precision with importance-aware fact coverage and responds as expected to four controlled perturbation types on 93.0-98.3% of valid caption pairs. Its Cross-Modal Semantic Round-Trip Score (CSRS) measures semantic preservation through a video-caption-video-caption round trip by matching atomic facts from source and recovered captions. Together, they connect downstream textual-memory utility with factual and semantic preservation.
Video generation method improves long sequences with full history access
Recast the Past: Stable Long Video Generation with Full Context Memory
Abstract: Long-horizon video generation requires retaining an ever-expanding history, but conditioning on its growing token sequence is costly. Existing methods restrict or compress historical context, potentially losing information needed for future generation. This work proposes ReCam, which groups local spatiotemporal blocks of historical latents into vectors and projects them directly into the high-dimensional hidden space of a Diffusion Transformer. The model learns to use the resulting memory tokens through native self-attention, reducing token count while retaining block-level access to the full history. To mitigate temporal drift during autoregressive rollout, we further introduce dual-pointer denoising with separate noise schedules for recent context and target frames. Among the evaluated methods, ReCam achieves the highest VBench-Long overall score of 80.1 and competitive static-scene revisitation performance on R2M-Bench. It also leads on all four consistency metrics for off-screen subject reappearance, including clothing consistency of 4.09 versus 3.03 for the best baseline.
PoSTCache improves cache accuracy for faster image generation
PoSTCache: From Forecasting to Postdictive Smoothing for Revisable Diffusion Caching
Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching models achieve impressive visual generation quality but remain computationally expensive due to iterative sampling. Caching-based acceleration provides a practical training-free solution by reusing or predicting intermediate features. However, existing methods largely enforce a forward-only information flow: approximations produced for skipped model evaluations are immediately committed to the sampling trajectory and cannot benefit from feedback generated by later full-computation steps. We propose \textbf{PoSTCache} (\emph{Postdictive Smoothing Trajectory Cache}), a training-free and plug-and-play framework that reformulates diffusion caching as revisable trajectory inference. PoSTCache first uses an existing caching strategy to construct forward proposals for skipped steps. At a later full-computation step, the discrepancy between the refreshed prediction and its forward proposal yields a correction signal, which PoSTCache propagates backward to refine and reintegrate the preceding predictions. Viewing full-computation steps as sources of corrective feedback also changes how they should be selected. We therefore introduce the Posterior Variance Reduction (PVR) strategy, which estimates cross-timestep dependencies from offline denoising trajectories and selects anchors according to their expected reduction in surrogate trajectory uncertainty rather than local approximation error alone. Experiments on representative image and video generation models show that PoSTCache consistently improves the quality--efficiency trade-off over representative caching methods.
LiveSync improves lip-sync accuracy using iterative self-training
LiveSync: Iterative Self-Training for Lip-Sync Generation
Abstract: Audio-driven lip synchronization aims to match target speech through localized mouth and jaw articulation while preserving subject identity, head pose, and surrounding facial context. Naturally recorded videos provide synchronized reconstruction targets but rarely offer pairs that are matched in identity and pose yet differ primarily in speech-related articulation. Mask-based training enables reconstruction from these videos, but random-reference inputs differ from the aligned self-reference used at inference. We present LiveSync, an iterative self-training framework in which a single mask-based model generates pseudo pairs and is refined for deployment. The model is first trained on a curated real-video corpus augmented with externally generated clips covering under-represented visual conditions. A frozen checkpoint then uses independently sampled audio to generate mouth-edited references from real-video frames, copying pixels outside the edit mask from each source frame. After confidence filtering, these references are paired with aligned masked inputs and original real-frame targets. The retained pseudo pairs are mixed with real training data to refine the same model from its current weights, updating training supervision without adding inference stages. Although we instantiate the framework with a single-pass GAN-based model, the self-training strategy could in principle also be adapted to diffusion-based models. Experimental results show that LiveSync achieves leading synchronization performance on HDTF and competitive performance compared with the baselines on the AIGC-LipSync subset, while maintaining low inference latency.
Text to video models made more reliable across wording changes
VARI: Robust Text-to-Video Generation via Group-Structured Intent Alignment
Abstract: Modern text-to-video (T2V) models generate visually compelling videos, yet meaning-preserving changes in prompt wording can substantially alter semantic realization and overall quality. Existing prompt rewriting modifies the inference input, whereas conventional post-training constructs supervision from one prompt formulation at a time; neither explicitly optimizes reliability across equivalent forms. We introduce VARI (Verified Alignment over Representations of Intent), a group-structured framework that treats automatically verified formulations of the same visual intent as a shared supervision unit. VARI builds matched form-seed rollout pools, cross-scores each video against all forms, and applies a wording-independent structured intent audit to identify valid realizations and hard semantic failures. Group-Consistent Distillation (GCD) aligns every verified form with interchangeable valid realizations, while Form-Contrastive Flow-DPO (FC-DPO) learns group-level preferences from audited positive-negative pairs, prioritizing same-seed, different-form contrasts. On HunyuanVideo-1.5, VARI attains the highest T2V-CompBench, VBench, and StoryEval scores among the evaluated methods. On prompt-form extensions of T2V-CompBench and VBench, it improves weakest-form alignment over the strongest prompt-level baselines by 2.45 and 3.55 points and reduces cross-form drop by 30.5% and 32.2%, respectively, while preserving visual quality. Human evaluation, natural-caption controls, prompt-enhancement experiments, diversity analyses, and transfer to LTX-2.3 further support the robustness and transferability of these gains, while VARI requires no additional inference-time module.
FlowCred improves text to video generation by clearer feedback and coordination
FlowCred: Hierarchical Credit Assignment and Functional Coordination for Joint Text-to-Video Post-Training
Abstract: Prompt optimization and generator post-training are two complementary ways to improve text-to-video (T2V) generation, and recent systems increasingly train both modules jointly. However, optimizing a prompt policy and a video generator from the same terminal reward creates two ambiguities: prompt quality is confounded with stochastic generation, and the two modules may realize overlapping local improvements. We introduce FlowCred, a two-level framework for joint T2V post-training. First, hierarchical credit assignment uses matched prompt-seed rollout grids to separate prompt-level credit from prompt-conditioned generator residuals under shared randomness. Second, functional coordination probes alternative current-policy prompts at states from actual generation trajectories, providing generator-aware evidence for prompt optimization while selectively attenuating generator updates already supported by conditioning changes. Across multiple T2V benchmarks, FlowCred consistently improves matched joint-training baselines. On LTX-2.5, FlowCred improves a strictly matched joint-training control from 61.47 to 64.46 on T2V-CompBench and from 55.58 to 58.08 on StoryEval, without increasing decoded-video or reward-model-call budgets. Factorial and realized-update analyses show complementary contributions from prompt shaping and generator routing, while human evaluation and transfer across backbones and updater families provide further supporting evidence.
Video generation improves physical realism with hierarchical alignment
MiMaAlign: Hierarchical Micro-Macro Alignment for Physically Plausible Video Generation
Abstract: Text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models have made remarkable progress in generating high-fidelity visuals, yet their outputs still often exhibit physically implausible phenomena, including discontinuous dynamics and implausible event interactions. Existing representation alignment methods mainly transfer generic video features or short-range motion cues, treating physical plausibility as a single-level representation problem. To address this issue, we propose MiMaAlign, a hierarchical micro-macro alignment framework that transfers complementary dynamics-oriented and event-oriented knowledge into different abstraction depths of a pretrained video diffusion model. Specifically, micro-level continuous dynamics alignment imposes constraints by aligning diffusion features with a continuous-time motion representation learned by a Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (Neural ODE), while macro-level event-commonsense alignment provides representations of object interactions and event semantics through an instruction-prompted vision-language model (VLM). With training-only auxiliary objectives, we align the complementary supervision from the two teachers with shallower and deeper generator features, respectively, enabling the generator to internalize the corresponding physical priors. Empirical evaluations show that, on CogVideoX-2B, MiMaAlign achieves a relative improvement of up to 21.0% in the Physical Commonsense (PC) score on the VideoPhy benchmark over the baseline, and also delivers substantial gains on the highly challenging VideoPhy2 benchmark, while maintaining general video quality on VBench and being supported by blind user comparisons.
Structured scripts improve multi-shot audio visual video generation
Structured Stateful Relational Scripts with a High-Quality Dataset for Multi-Shot Audio-Visual Video Generation
Abstract: Coherent multi-shot audio-visual video generation requires maintaining consistent identities while depicting evolving states and coordinating sounds across shot boundaries. Although dense captions describe individual shots in detail, they rarely specify which entities persist, how their states change, or which entities and actions produce sounds. To address this limitation, we propose Structured Stateful Relational Scripts (SSRS), a textual supervision representation that separates persistent entity and voice identities from shot-specific visual and auditory states. SSRS explicitly encodes sound-source bindings and temporal relations, while a global audio-visual event sequence connects local actions and sounds, including events that continue across shot boundaries. We further introduce MSAV-Script-100K, a large-scale dataset of curated multi-shot audio-visual videos paired with detailed SSRS annotations, enabling models to learn identity persistence, state transitions, and event continuity from structured supervision. Experiments demonstrate improvements in cross-shot consistency, adherence to specified state changes, and audio-visual alignment, highlighting the effectiveness of our SSRS and MSAV-Script-100K for coherent multi-shot audio-visual generation. Our proposed dataset is available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/shenlehan/MSAV-Script-100K}{MSAV-Script-100K}.
Text to video models vary in expressing and controlling emotions accurately
EmoTrace-Bench: Diagnosing Emotional Expression in Text-to-Video Generation through Controlled Cues and Intensity
Abstract: Text-to-video (T2V) models are increasingly used to generate videos with targeted emotional expressions, yet existing evaluation methods mainly rely on holistic video-text alignment and provide limited insight into whether failures arise from target-emotion expression, intensity control, or specific affective cues. We introduce EmoTrace-Bench, a fine-grained diagnostic benchmark that controls emotion intensity and selected affective cues in prompts and evaluates generated videos at multiple levels. EmoTrace-Bench contains 448 controlled prompts covering eight emotions, two intensity levels, and diverse cue conditions. Using 12 T2V models, we generate 5,376 videos and evaluate target-emotion presence, perceived intensity, and ten audiovisual dimensions of emotional expression with an automated evaluator calibrated and validated against human annotations on a subset of the data. Results reveal substantial differences across models and prompt designs. Prompts that explicitly describe a character's emotional reaction are followed more reliably than prompts that describe only events or scenes, whereas adding more affective cues or using more explicit cinematic audiovisual language does not consistently improve emotional generation. These results illustrate how aggregate alignment scores may overlook localized differences in target-emotion expression, intensity control, and cue realization. EmoTrace-Bench provides a traceable and interpretable framework for diagnosing emotional video generation without modifying existing generation pipelines, and we release the prompts and the automated evaluation rules.
Tide speeds up text to video prompt improvements without slow searches
TIDE: Trajectory-Informed Skill Distillation for Efficient Text-to-Video Prompt Optimization
Abstract: Text-to-video (T2V) models are highly sensitive to prompt specificity, while iterative prompt optimization typically improves generation quality only through repeated video generation and vision-language model evaluation at inference time. We propose TIDE, a framework that distills this costly search process into an interpretable and reusable prompt-rewriting Skill. TIDE formulates prompt rewriting as a set of source-conditioned rule modules, each targeting a distinct semantic dimension. Once distilled, the frozen Skill activates the relevant rules and generates both positive and negative prompts in a single LLM call, followed by only one T2V generation, without test-time visual search or backbone fine-tuning. Evolved using only 100 prompts over 14 hours, TIDE achieves prompt-optimization performance comparable to computationally expensive search-based methods. Moreover, when transferred to previously unseen video-generation models, TIDE outperforms existing approaches specifically designed or trained for those models. Code is available at https://github.com/xiningin/TIDE_T2V.
Suppressing image feedback improves multimodal diffusion transformers
Images Talk Back: Guiding MMDiTs by Suppressing Image-to-Text Feedback
Abstract: Multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs) allow the evolving image to update internal text representations through joint attention. These representations then guide subsequent image updates, raising a question: does this feedback help correct deviations from the prompt, or preserve them? We find that image-to-text (I2T) feedback can preserve the objects and attributes already represented in the evolving image, including errors. Transplanting I2T messages can rescue failures or disrupt successes. At matched intervention strengths, suppressing the influence of I2T feedback improves generation, whereas opposite controls degrade it. These findings motivate Semantic Feedback Guidance (SFG), which suppresses the influence of I2T feedback by guiding away from an auxiliary branch that strengthens this feedback and weakens text-to-image conditioning. The in-place variant, iSFG, directly suppresses I2T feedback and strengthens text-to-image conditioning, requiring no extra model evaluations. Temporal interventions motivate running the SFG branch during the first 20% of image sampling steps, requiring about $1.2\times$ the base NFE without classifier-free guidance (CFG). Experiments across three image-generation backbones show gains in alignment and preference-model scores. On FLUX, adding SFG to CFG raises GenEval from $0.6661$ to $0.7479$; on SD3.5M, iSFG adds $+1.33$ HPSv2.1 over CFG at zero extra NFE. The control also transfers to text-to-video and image-to-video generation, improving VBench scores. Code is available at https://github.com/yyc1215lll-creator/SFG.
PreCoG speeds up video editing by previewing and reusing work
PreCoG: Preview-Edit for Efficient Video Correction in Generation-Time
Abstract: Iterative text-to-video generation relies on feedback to correct compositional and temporal failures. However, existing methods typically require another full generation run for each correction, repeating computation and potentially disrupting already correct content. We introduce PreCoG, an iterative framework for correcting semantic failures during video generation. PreQA diagnoses failures from low-cost previews and constructs corrective conditions, while PreEdit edits cached generation trajectories under these conditions, attenuating orthogonal changes to limit disruption of already correct content. PreCoG completes generation only for the selected candidate, reusing its cached trajectory to reduce redundant computation and help preserve semantic consistency between the preview and the final video. Experiments show that PreCoG achieves the highest VBench and T2V-CompBench scores and approaches VSR's leading VS2 score at $0.56\times$ its inference time. It also outperforms GENMAC on all three quality and alignment metrics at $0.86\times$ its inference time.
Capable video editing unlocked by transferring image editing skills
VINCIE-NExT: Unlocking Video Editing from Images via In-Context Modeling
Abstract: Building a capable video editor remains significantly harder than a video generator: editing requires (source, instruction, edited) triplets that are prohibitively expensive to annotate and difficult to synthesize at scale, whereas image editing has already reached maturity with millions of such pairs readily available. In this work, we introduce VINCIE-NExT, a unified framework that transfers editing capability from images to videos through in-context visual demonstrations, alleviating the need for large-scale paired video editing data. VINCIE-NExT decomposes video editing into a structured chain of composable sub-tasks (Video -> Image -> Image -> Video), routing editing intent through the image domain and enabling scalable joint training from heterogeneous image and video corpora under a unified diffusion objective. An image editing pair, synthesized by the model or supplied by the user, is prepended as an in-context visual demonstration that serves as a spatial appearance blueprint for every output frame. To ground appearance edits across the interleaved context, we introduce a novel position encoding that links image demonstrations and video frames in a shared spatial coordinate system, enabling pixel-faithful propagation of appearance changes to every output frame. Chain-of-Editing further provides principled test-time scaling: by executing the sub-task chain as progressive diffusion stages, editing quality can be improved by investing additional compute without retraining. Comprehensive experiments on OpenVE-Bench demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across diverse editing categories, with ablations confirming the effectiveness of each component.
Parametric trajectory distillation improves fast video generation quality
Parametric Trajectory Distillation for Few-Step Video Generation
Abstract: Video diffusion and flow models require many sequential evaluations, making generation computationally expensive. Few-step distillation reduces this cost but poses a capacity allocation problem: a student must match the teacher's iterative generation with far less sequential computation. Existing trajectory methods ask the student to reproduce teacher transitions that are highly curved at high noise, which can exceed its capacity and degrade fine detail. We introduce Parametric Trajectory Distillation (PTD), which lets the student parameterize teacher trajectory segments as polynomials and learn from teacher guidance along its own predicted path. PTD is designed to let the learned curvature adapt to the backbone's predictive capacity, preserving motion and diversity. The curvature head is used only in training; inference keeps the original backbone architecture. On Wan2.1-14B, four-step PTD sets a new state of the art for trajectory distillation, significantly improving dynamic quality and naturalness over PDD, the best-performing trajectory-only method on this model, under the same training setting. On the 33B audio-video MiniMax-H3, LoRA-trained PTD significantly improves diversity and naturalness over the state-of-the-art LightX2V Turbo. Blinded human votes give PTD 55.1% and 63.4% preference shares against PDD and LightX2V Turbo. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/PTD/.
Transform image editors into video editors using keyframe anchors
Transforming Image Editors into Video Editors
Abstract: Recent image editing systems have achieved impressive semantic understanding, visual fidelity, and instruction-following ability, while video editing remains substantially more difficult and costly. In this paper, we present a simple alternative to end-to-end video editing: instead of training a monolithic video editor, we transform a strong image editor into a video editor through anchor-based generation. Our key insight is that video editing can be decomposed into two subproblems: editing a sparse set of keyframes and propagating those edits across time. Based on this observation, we propose Anchor-based Video Editing (AVE), a two-stage framework in which a powerful image editor first performs composed editing on selected keyframes, and a motion-guided image-to-video diffusion model then generates the final video by treating the edited keyframes as fixed anchors. This design directly inherits the strengths of modern image editors while avoiding expensive end-to-end video editing training. Experiments on IVEBench and VIE-Bench show that AVE achieves strong performance in instruction following, temporal consistency, and content fidelity. Further ablations reveal that final video editing quality is strongly correlated with the quality of the image editor, suggesting that future progress in video editing may come from stronger image editing foundations and lightweight transfer to video. Code is available at https://github.com/wangf3014/AVE.
Alive framework improves object insertion with natural video interactions
ALIVE: Interaction-Aligned Object Insertion for First-Frame-Guided Video Editing
Abstract: Current video editors can insert objects but often struggle to make them participate in interactions such as being picked up or manipulated. We introduce ALIVE, a framework that makes inserted objects "alive" through coherent interactions with the source video's contents, using an edited first frame and an instruction naming only the added object. We curate 35,800 editing pairs combining 3D-rendered, model-generated, and real-world videos with general editing pairs from ROSE. Each pair differs in the target object's presence while preserving the surrounding action, teaching editors coordinated object behavior and source preservation. We further train a vision-language model (VLM) to predict interaction guidance from the same inputs. We introduce the ALIVE-interaction benchmark to assess interaction fidelity, source preservation, and visual coherence using a unified VLM-based protocol, and evaluate on the general video object insertion benchmark. Without VLM guidance, ALIVE improves Overall over the strongest evaluated baseline by 43.9% and 4.4% on the two benchmarks, respectively. VLM-predicted guidance further improves the ALIVE-interaction score by 0.95 points without additional user inputs.
Personalized video generation routing cuts cost and matches preferences
TasteRoute: Personalized Routing for Video Generation
Abstract: Rapid progress in video generation has led to a plethora of models that differ substantially in capability and generation cost. This raises a natural question: can each request be efficiently routed to an appropriate model? We find that even when the consensus of the other annotators is used as an oracle, it agrees with each annotator's own favorite only 34-55% of the time. Motivated by this observation, we introduce TasteRoute, a personalized video-generation router that selects a generator jointly based on the input request, user preferences, and available generation budget. Across text-to-video and image-to-video settings, TasteRoute is competitive with strong simple baselines on preference routing while reducing average generation cost. The cost saving increases under higher budget caps. Finally, we release TasteRoute-3k, a human-annotated dataset containing multi-model video comparisons, quality judgments, preference rankings, and user-profile signals to facilitate future research on personalized and cost-aware video routing.
Kandinsky 6 video generates short clips with synced audio and lip movements
Kandinsky 6.0 Video: Foundation Models for Synchronized Video and Audio Generation
Abstract: We present Kandinsky 6.0 Video, a family of foundation diffusion models for synchronized text-to-audio-video generation, comprising Kandinsky 6.0 Video Lite (3B parameters) and Kandinsky 6.0 Video Pro (29B parameters). Both models generate 5-second video clips with synchronized 44 kHz audio, including lip-sync, in text-to-audio-video (T2AV) and image-to-audio-video (I2AV) modes; a built-in super-resolution model raises the output resolution to Full-HD (1920$\times$1080). Building on the video generation capabilities of Kandinsky 5.0, Kandinsky 6.0 Video employs a dual-stream CrossDiT architecture that connects a pretrained video stream and a newly trained audio stream through bidirectional cross-attention for temporal and semantic alignment. Our continuous pretraining strategy first trains the audio stream from scratch on large-scale audio corpora and then trains both streams jointly on paired audio-video data while preserving unimodal fidelity; pretraining is followed by supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement-learning-based post-training, and distillation. In side-by-side human evaluation, Kandinsky 6.0 Video Pro clearly outperforms its predecessor, Kandinsky 5.0 Video Pro, and remains competitive with leading audio-video generation models, particularly in speech quality. To accelerate open research and deployment in multimedia generation, we release the code, model checkpoints, and diffusers integration under the MIT license.
DuoMatching improves video generation with frame and joint distribution matching
DuoMatching: Joint-Marginal Distribution Matching for Few-Step Video Generation
Abstract: Streaming video generation has benefited from distribution matching distillation (DMD), which matches the joint distribution of video frames to a video teacher's approximation of the real video distribution. Although this joint matching mitigates drift during autoregressive rollouts, limitations remain in visual quality and semantic alignment. To address these limitations, we propose DuoMatching, a distribution matching framework that approximates the real video distribution through a unified joint-marginal formulation. On top of existing joint matching formulations, the additional marginal matching objective provides dedicated frame-level supervision from an image generator, transferring complementary visual and semantic priors from it. To apply this frame-level supervision in video generation, we introduce LatentBridge to resolve the latent representation mismatch between the video student and the image teacher. Latent Variation Sampling further distributes such frame-level supervision across distinct temporal segments, reducing redundancy. Experiments demonstrate that DuoMatching improves visual quality, composition, and semantic alignment while largely preserving motion dynamics. Human evaluations show overall preference rates above 80% against all evaluated baselines. The project page is available at https://johnzhan2023.github.io/DuoMatching/.
Video saliency modeling improves with dynamic content dataset
Moving Forward with Video Saliency: A New Dataset and Benchmark where Motion Matters
Abstract: Video saliency prediction is inherently harder to model than static image saliency due to the additional temporal dimension. Video saliency benchmarks rest on the premise that predicting gaze on video requires utilizing temporal activity distributed across frames. Prior work has challenged this, showing that static baselines recover a significant fraction of the explainable gaze information on LEDOV, a popular video saliency dataset, and that video saliency models fail in the same places as this static baseline. We verify that this diagnosis still stands: under a more capable gold standard than the original analysis, and an updated panel of recent architectures, the strongest temporal architecture in the panel still does not substantially improve over a fine-tuned static baseline. However, it remains unclear whether the marginal gain reflects limitations of current temporal architectures or a lack of temporal patterns in the benchmark itself. We introduce SalTempto, a video saliency benchmark with greater dynamism: 224 clips of highly dynamic content, sourced from the HACS-Segments dataset so that each clip contains an event together with its lead-up and aftermath, with gaze recordings from up to 16 subjects and a training split for adapting pretrained models. On SalTempto, the static baseline recovers only about 13\% of the headroom above the centerbias, against more than half on LEDOV. A fine-tuned temporal architecture shows a substantial gain in performance over the static baseline, indicating that it does capture meaningfully more temporal information, which LEDOV fails to measure. Yet, even this SoTA model still leaves nearly half of SalTempto's headroom unexplained, indicating room for improvement in video saliency modelling. Examination of SalTempto also lets us describe human tendencies that models miss. SalTempto link: https://huggingface.co/datasets/bethgelab/video_saliency.
Video generation improved with faster few-step distilled models
VDOT++: Unified Few-Step Video Generation via Unbalanced Optimal Transport Distillation
Abstract: Video creation spans text-to-video (T2V), image-to-video (I2V), and condition-based generation, yet video diffusion models remain costly because they repeatedly evaluate large backbones during sampling. Distribution matching distillation (DMD) reduces this cost, but its reverse Kullback--Leibler (KL) objective can provide unstable or incomplete guidance when the student and teacher distributions have limited overlap. VDOT addressed this issue by adding optimal transport distillation (OTD), whose explicit coupling supplies geometric directions for condition-based generation. Balanced OTD, however, performs full-mass matching between the spatial tokens of each corresponding student--teacher frame pair. This assumption weakens for T2V and I2V, where one condition admits many valid outputs and spatial content need not align across different realizations. We present VDOT++, a unified distillation framework that applies the same training recipe separately to generators for the three task families. It makes OTD robust to output diversity through an asymmetric unbalanced formulation that allows unreliable student tokens to carry less mass while maintaining coverage of the teacher tokens. An $\ell_1$ ground cost further replaces mean-based aggregation with a more mode-preserving weighted median that limits the influence of distant transport targets. The two changes respectively determine whom to match and how the selected targets should be aggregated. We additionally combine distribution matching and adversarial refinement through sequential backward passes, and exploit the decoupled score networks for cross-scale distillation, where larger score networks improve a compact generator. Experiments on UVCBench, VBench, VBench-I2V, and the VACE benchmark show that the resulting four-step generators are competitive with many-step teachers and strong few-step baselines across all three task families.
Custom forcing enables fast personalized video generation from images
Custom Forcing: Training-Free Subject Customization for Autoregressive Video Generation
Abstract: Autoregressive video models can generate minute-long videos in real time, but they produce generic subjects from text rather than specific subjects from user-provided images. Existing customization methods either require costly per-subject optimization or use pretrained conditioning networks that jointly process all video frames with bidirectional attention. Neither approach is designed for causal streaming. We present Custom Forcing, a training-free method that stores reference-based anchor frames in the persistent KV cache of a frozen autoregressive video model. However, fixed anchors face two limitations: simple conditioning allows identity to drift, and the text prompt continues to favor a generic subject. To address these problems, drift-adaptive value amplification (DVA) scales reference influence with the degree of identity drift, while anchor contrast guidance (ACG) steers generation away from the generic class prior. Over two-minute rollouts, fixed anchors fall from 0.58 to 0.42 in DINO-I, while Custom Forcing keeps it between 0.58 and 0.62 without reducing motion. Custom Forcing also achieves higher subject similarity than bidirectional customization methods and better preserves identity over 30s than causal image-to-video and reference-to-video models, while generating each frame 9.5--28.5 times faster than these long-video baselines.
Video generation models struggle to create varied motion and camera effects
DiVid: Diagnosing Dimension-Specific Diversity Collapse in Video Generation Models
Abstract: Despite remarkable progress, video generation models often produce highly similar outputs when repeatedly sampled from the same prompt, limiting their usefulness for creative exploration. Existing diversity evaluations primarily rely on global scalar metrics, which obscure where diversity collapses in the spatiotemporal space of videos. We introduce DiVid, a dimension-level diagnostic framework that decomposes video generation diversity into six interpretable dimensions: Semantic, Style, Subject, Scene, Motion, and Camera. Each dimension is measured through a reproducible computer-vision pipeline and analyzed alongside quality and instruction faithfulness to examine potential trade-offs. Systematic evaluation of representative video generation models reveals that diversity is highly dimension-specific: models with strong global diversity scores still collapse on specific factors, particularly Motion and Camera. These rankings persist after filtering unfaithful generations, indicating genuine capability differences rather than off-prompt outputs. Beyond measurement, controlled prompt interventions identify two fundamental bottlenecks: default mode convergence, where models fall back to dominant patterns under open-ended prompts; and realization gaps, where models fail to faithfully realize diverse, explicitly requested alternatives, particularly for temporal factors. The larger faithfulness losses for temporal factors highlight the difficulty of controlling motion and camera variation through text alone. DiVid thus shifts the study of diversity from measuring whether it exists to diagnosing where and why it collapses, and provides actionable directions for dimension-aware training objectives and control signals. The framework will be released to facilitate future research on diverse and controllable video generation.
Video generation models improve control and reliability after training
Video Generation Models: A Survey of Post-Training and Alignment
Abstract: Video generation has rapidly progressed from short, low-quality clips to high-resolution, long-duration sequences with complex spatiotemporal dynamics. Despite strong generative priors learned through large-scale pretraining, pretrained video models often fail to reliably follow human intent, maintain temporal coherence, or satisfy physical and safety constraints. Compared with image and text generation, alignment in video generation presents unique challenges, including error accumulation over time, motion-appearance coupling, multi-objective trade-offs, and limited supervision for temporal properties. These challenges motivate systematic post-training strategies that adapt pretrained models without retraining them from scratch. In this survey, we present the first comprehensive review of post-training and alignment in video generation models. We frame post-training as a unifying framework and distinguish between implicit alignment and explicit alignment based on how alignment signals are enforced. From this perspective, we organize existing approaches into four broad categories: supervised fine-tuning methods, self-training and distillation methods, preference- and reward-based methods, and inference-time methods. This taxonomy provides a coherent view of how alignment signals shape model behavior across both training and deployment. Beyond methodological advances, we review commonly used datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation practices, and discuss open challenges such as scalable reward design, long-horizon temporal consistency, stability-expressiveness trade-offs, and safety-aware generation. This survey aims to provide a structured conceptual foundation and practical guidance for advancing controllable and reliable video generation models.
Video virtual try-on preserves garment textures in high resolution
TexTailor: Texture-Preserving Video Virtual Try-On via Adaptive Garment Conditioning
Abstract: Video virtual try-on has attracted increasing attention due to its broad potential in digital fashion and intelligent e-commerce. However, existing methods primarily focus on low-resolution settings and still face substantial challenges when extended to high-resolution scenarios. These limitations can be attributed to two main factors: (1) the insufficient utilization of rich garment reference information, and (2) the lack of explicit positional modeling between garment and video representations during cross-modal interaction, which weakens fine-grained local correspondence. To address these issues, we propose TexTailor, a high-fidelity video virtual try-on framework built upon a pretrained video Diffusion Transformer. Specifically, we introduce a timestep-adaptive modulation mechanism to dynamically adjust garment visual representations throughout denoising. We further develop a frame-aligned positional encoding strategy to strengthen garment-to-video correspondence, together with a multi-source injection design that reduces interference among heterogeneous conditions. Extensive experiments on multiple video virtual try-on benchmarks, including the high-resolution Eevee dataset, demonstrate that TexTailor achieves competitive performance in garment detail preservation, temporal consistency, and overall video quality.
MegaAvatar generates talking avatars with full body and face control
MegaAvatar: Controllable Talking Avatar Generation
Abstract: This report presents \textbf{MegaAvatar}, a controllable talking avatar generation framework built on top of the Wan2.2-TI2V-5B model. Compared with previous talking-avatar methods that mainly rely on audio or reference-image conditioning, we introduce additional SMPL-X-derived 3D guidance, enabling global control over body pose and head motion. Specifically, we render the driving SMPL-X sequence into dense mesh frames and encode them with a lightweight 3D convolutional encoder, whose outputs are injected into the latent tokens to provide overall motion control. Furthermore, we extend Wan2.2-TI2V-5B with additional audio and face cross-attention modules to enable fine-grained expression control and preserve the input identity, respectively. In addition, we implement an audio-to-SMPL-X model to predict an SMPL-X sequence conditioned on the reference image and input audio, allowing MegaAvatar to support audio-driven inference without user-provided SMPL-X frames. Experiments show that MegaAvatar achieves high-quality talking avatar generation with controllable body and head motion, speech-synchronized facial expressions, and consistent identity preservation. MegaAvatar also supports inference with flexible resolutions and video lengths. Codes, dataset, models will be avaliable in https://github.com/Jeoyal/MegaAvatar
LongTake improves long video generation with sustained dynamics
LongTake: Learning to Sustain Dynamics in Long-Horizon Video Generation
Abstract: World models, game simulators, and long-take video creation require coherent scene evolution and sustained dynamics over extended durations. Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion provides a natural framework for long-horizon generation, yet extended rollouts often become near-static or lose visual quality. We hypothesize that these failures reflect the limited guidance provided by short-video supervision on how ongoing scene dynamics develops over longer durations. This motivates us to introduce LongTake, a two-stage training pipeline built around Long-Horizon Teacher Forcing (TF) on curated real long videos. Long-Horizon TF trains the AR model to predict later frames conditioned on long ground-truth video prefixes, extending direct supervision beyond the short training horizon. This supervision is designed to help the model sustain dynamics and preserve visual quality during long-horizon generation. Our central finding is that this training stage strengthens direct initialization for distribution matching distillation (DMD) under student self-rollout, without the intermediate few-step distillation stage used in standard pipelines. Under the same five-second DMD training setup, our initialization yields substantially higher dynamic degree than short horizon TF initialization on 30-second rollouts at comparable aesthetic quality, and surpasses the evaluated baselines in both measures. Hybrid DMD further reuses this teacher to extend supervision to later frames of the self-rollout while retaining bidirectional joint supervision over the initial window. On long-horizon self-rollouts, LongTake lies on the Pareto front of dynamic degree and aesthetic quality, and Hybrid DMD attains the highest dynamic degree among evaluated methods at both 30s and 60s.
Modal kinetic typography animates letters with smooth, meaningful motion
Strike a Chord! Modal Kinetic Typography
Abstract: We introduce modal kinetic typography, which animates a vector glyph to express a semantic concept while keeping it legible. Our key idea is to build motion from the glyph's natural vibration modes. Specifically, a finite-element eigenproblem assembled from the vector outline yields the glyph's softest modes, for the whole letter and for each of its parts, allowing it to bend. The problem's zero-energy solutions, i.e., rigid translations and rotations, are applied in closed form to each part, allowing parts to also move as blocks. To animate the glyph, a frozen video diffusion model supervises only the modes' amplitudes and phases. Our modal approach addresses two weaknesses of prior work. Free-form point optimization under video score distillation (SDS) moves each point and frame independently along noisy gradients, tearing the outline and causing jitter. In contrast, our modes are smooth along the outline and driven by a few whole-cycle harmonics, which restricts these gradients to smooth, seamlessly looping motion. On the other hand, structured alternatives rely on skeletons or keypoints from category-specific priors, whereas our modes come from the glyph itself; the only prior is a list naming each letter's moving parts, generated once for the whole alphabet by a language model. In modal kinetic typography, shape and motion are disentangled by construction: a single base outline is sculpted toward the concept, and the modal drive cannot alter it, so a letter can also be animated without being reshaped. Our method produces more articulated and smoother motion than Dynamic Typography and AniClipart at comparable or better concept alignment, with less glyph tearing than Dynamic Typography, and is preferred by human raters, including in a frozen-shape setting where motion alone must carry the concept. Our results were also preferred over Astra (GPT-6) by human raters.
Human motion and camera paths generated with translation control
AESOP: Asymmetric Human-Camera Generation with Translation-Intensity Control
Abstract: Human motion defines an action, while a camera trajectory determines how it is presented. Camera generation for a given human motion and joint human-camera generation are usually treated as separate tasks, although both share an asymmetric dependency: human motion can be generated independently, whereas the camera responds to the realized action. We introduce AESOP, a unified framework with an independent human pathway and a shared human-conditioned camera generator. Its asymmetric architecture serves both tasks while preserving the human output during camera generation. Although human context anchors the shot to the action and camera text describes its movement, translation intensity remains underspecified. We therefore construct trajectory pairs that differ in camera translation magnitude while sharing human motion and camera text, then use these pairs to learn an explicit intensity condition. Experiments on the PulpMotion dataset demonstrate strong camera distributional and framing quality in both tasks and effective control over camera translation intensity.
Compact memory tokens improve long video quality and consistency
Compress to Remember: Learning Compact Memory via On-Policy Distillation for Long Video Generation
Abstract: Standard video generators do not natively compact historical context into reusable memory tokens. As generation continues, the growing history makes it increasingly difficult to retain information from earlier frames due to long-context degradation. Key-frame-based approaches address this challenge by retaining selected past frames, but can discard information needed for future generation. Rather than relying on frame selection alone, we study whether a frozen video generator can supply the supervision needed to learn a compact representation of the history. We propose Prediction-Aligned Context Compaction (PACC), which uses a learned compressor to aggregate information across past frames into compact memory tokens. We train the compressor through on-policy distillation, using the same frozen generator both as a student when conditioned on compressed memory and as a teacher when conditioned on the full history. The student generates continuations, while the teacher provides targets for the same noisy inputs at each denoising step. Only the compressor is updated to align the student's predictions with these targets. We evaluate PACC on MBench, which jointly measures memory-event coverage and consistency. PACC outperforms the strongest baseline by 6.63 points on Causal-rCM and 3.19 points on Causal Forcing. Evaluation on VBench-Long using MovieGen prompts further shows that PACC produces minute-long videos with generation quality competitive with baselines. Together, these results show that learning to compact historical context can improve long-video memory without modifying the underlying generator.
Immersive audiovisual experience created from silent narrow videos
Enabling Immersive Audio-Visual Experience from Any Video
Abstract: Most videos capture only a narrow field of view and provide no spatial audio, limiting the sense of immersion they can provide. Recent video generation models can expand perspective videos into panoramic ones, but do not provide the corresponding spatial soundscape. Without spatially consistent audio, these expanded visual worlds remain incomplete. This paper presents OmniDream, a training-free framework that transforms a silent monocular video into an immersive audiovisual experience, where viewers can freely look around while sounds remain spatially aligned with the visual scene. At the core of OmniDream is an object-centric audio representation that disentangles each sound source's intrinsic audio content from its scene-dependent acoustic effects, enabling independent audio generation, physics-based simulation of propagation effects, and flexible spatial audio rendering. Experiments show improved audio-visual alignment, spatial correctness, and perceptual immersiveness over baselines. Examples are available on https://huggingface.co/spaces/CuriousAlien000/spatial-audio-360-demo
Previewdiff improves image and video generation by guiding diffusion early
PreviewDiff: Multimodal Critic-Guided Search over Diffusion Latents
Abstract: Diffusion models can produce striking images and videos, but they still struggle with the compositional details that make a generation faithful to a prompt, such as object counts, attribute binding, spatial relations, and temporally grounded actions. A common way to improve prompt satisfaction is to spend more compute at test time through Best-of-N sampling, but final-sample selection is fixed. Best-of-N can only choose among completed outputs and cannot repair a promising trajectory before it fails. We introduce PreviewDiff, a training-free test-time search method that turns diffusion sampling from scalar search into a multimodal critic-guided search over intermediate latents. At selected denoising checkpoints, PreviewDiff decodes a partial preview, asks a multimodal judge to score and critique it, and uses the resulting natural-language feedback to branch over semantic prompt edits and locally re-noised latent continuations. These branches are then scored and selectively rolled forward, allowing verifier compute to guide generation while the sample is still editable. Across image and video generation benchmarks, PreviewDiff consistently improves over budget-matched Best-of-N selection and strong scalar-search baselines. Ablations show that earlier interventions and increased search width provide the largest gains, while deeper search and additional semantic variants offer complementary improvements. PreviewDiff demonstrates that multimodal feedback is most useful not only as a final verifier, but as an active controller inside the denoising process.
Benchmarking audio video generation with multiple reference inputs
ORAV: Benchmarking Audio-Video Generation from Multimodal Contexts
Abstract: Audio-video generation using heterogeneous multimodal references has emerged as a new challenge, requiring both compositional control over generation and grounded understanding of multimodal context. In this paper, we introduce ORAV Bench for Omni Reference Audio-Video Generation, comprising 380 task instances with 2-10 references, 9 semantic roles, and 30 role compositions. Instructions specify the relationships among references; the media supply the identities, dynamics, and audio characteristics to be realized. To evaluate these open-ended outputs, we develop a reference-aware pairwise protocol that prepares visual and auditory evidence, compares the intended contribution of each reference, and checks the overall verdict in both presentation orders. On held-out instances, it achieves 86.08% effective agreement with human judgments. Across 5 frontier systems, overall rankings conceal distinct strengths across reference compositions. A recurring failure is to reproduce unintended source content in place of the requested result, despite closely resembling a reference. Reproducible pointwise diagnostics of quality, reference affinity, and speech reveal distinct dimensions of model behavior. ORAV thus offers a benchmark for tracking progress toward controllable, compositional, and reference-faithful audio-video generation.
SubjectAnchor improves identity consistency in multi-shot video storytelling
SubjectAnchor: Subject-Aware Memory-to-Video for Multi-Shot Storytelling
Abstract: We present SubjectAnchor, a Subject-Aware Memory-to-Video paradigm for multi-shot storytelling in which the current shot is generated by conditioning on explicit visual memories extracted from previous shots. The objective is to preserve subject identity and scene consistency across cuts while retaining the controllability of shot-wise prompting. Built on Wan2.2-I2V-A14B, SubjectAnchor contains three key components: subject-related memory construction, subject-aware temporal rotary position encoding, and memory-aware attention partition. For each target shot, the method constructs a compact memory bank by tracing each required subject to its historical appearance and retrieving the most relevant precomputed keyframes. These memory frames are encoded into the model input as explicit visual conditions, while different subjects are assigned to separated negative temporal slots to reduce identity interference. In addition, memory-aware attention partition regulates the interaction between memory tokens and generated content within a shared backbone. This formulation preserves the appearance anchoring of explicit visual memory while remaining compatible with script-driven shot-by-shot generation. Experiments show that SubjectAnchor improves cross-shot identity consistency over representative memory-based and holistic baselines while maintaining competitive visual quality.
Image experts improve video diffusion models with preserved motion
From Static to Dynamic: On-Policy Distillation from Image to Video Diffusion Models
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) specializes pretrained video diffusion models through teacher supervision along the student's own generation trajectory. Although large video models are natural teachers, developing specialized video experts can require costly video data and training, while querying them incurs substantially higher latency than querying image experts. More readily available and cheaper to query, image experts offer a cost-effective alternative, particularly for largely temporal-agnostic capabilities such as aesthetics and OCR that admit frame-level supervision. However, heterogeneous image and video latent spaces prevent direct supervision of intermediate student states, while image experts lack cross-frame motion supervision, making temporal consistency vulnerable to frame-level improvements. In this paper, we propose MILD, a Motion-Preserving Image-to-Video Latent Distillation framework that transfers specialized image expertise while preserving pretrained video dynamics. MILD uses a learnable linear connector that aligns student latent states and predicted updates with those of image experts, enabling supervision transfer across heterogeneous latent spaces. We further constrain image-guided corrections around the pretrained student's predictions to preserve video dynamics and incorporate an optical-flow-based motion reward to improve motion quality and temporal consistency. Across specialized image experts and multiple video-student backbones, our method consistently outperforms video-teacher OPD baselines, with further studies demonstrating effective transfer across connector designs and heterogeneous architectures. These results establish image-to-video distillation as an effective route to improving video generation by drawing on the diverse and evolving capabilities of the image-generation ecosystem.
Video generation speeds up with mixed precision and draft attention
DraftAttention2: Fast Video Diffusion with Low-Resolution-Guided Mixed-Precision Attention
Abstract: Video generation has broad applications in content creation and entertainment. Diffusion transformers have advanced the quality of generated videos, but attention over spatiotemporal tokens becomes increasingly expensive as video resolution and duration increase. We present DraftAttention2, a training-free framework that uses the low-resolution draft attention map to jointly select attention blocks and assign their numerical precision. Specifically, spatial 2D average- and max-pooled queries and keys capture complementary regional statistics to estimate block importance, and a shared ranking assigns higher precision to important blocks, lower precision to less important retained blocks, and skips the rest under configurable budgets. Our analysis separates sparsification error from attention-weighted quantization error, establishing when recovering skipped interactions with low-bit computation tightens the output-error bound. This analysis motivates retaining more interactions at low precision while reserving higher precision for blocks with larger attention mass. To translate these fine-grained assignments into practical speedups, we further develop fused operand preparation and a single attention kernel with precision-specific phases, sharing data movement, softmax statistics, and output accumulation across precisions. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a superior quality-efficiency trade-off over existing efficient video generation methods. Notably, its advantage is particularly pronounced for few-step video diffusion, where jointly combining sparsity with 4- and 8-bit mixed-precision computation substantially improves generation quality while retaining significant acceleration. Code is available at https://github.com/anemoi-project/anemoi
Multi-agent system improves consistent video generation across shots
MVAgent: Multi-Agent Video Generation via Consistent Condition Construction and Shot-Level Policy Optimization
Abstract: Multi-shot agentic video generation requires consistent character appearance, stable spatial layout across camera angles, and continuous character state between shots. When every shot is a separate request to a frozen generator, repeated text does not determine appearance, layout or state. We therefore recast the problem as condition construction and present MVAgent, a multi-agent pipeline whose agents collaborate through typed conditioning inputs. Because an environment image shows one viewpoint, a Spatial Grounding agent samples views from generated camera-traversal clips and anchors each shot to the view matching its framing. As generated shots drift from the plan, an Observer records how each shot ends in a continuity memory, from which a Transition agent builds character action and spatial references for the next shot. An Orchestrator composes these inputs into each request. Since a request reveals its effect only after rendering, we train it by agentic reinforcement learning with Trunk-GDPO, which compares rendered candidates at every shot rather than once per video and continues the best as the trunk. With generator and judges frozen, MVAgent attains the highest cross-shot consistency and narrative-planning quality among the compared methods on ViMax-Bench and is preferred over the strongest agentic baseline in human evaluation.
WanPE improves cinematic prompts for longer text-to-video generation
WanPE: Towards Cinematic Prompt Enhancement for Modern Text-to-Video Generation
Abstract: Video generation begins in text space by authoring a cinematic screenplay, then materializes into pixels. As contemporary video generators scale to 30 seconds and faithfully follow complex conditions, the textual prompt largely directs the production, planning how actions, camera trajectories, lighting, and sound unfold across multi-shot sequences. In this paper, we present WanPE, a 397B-parameter prompt enhancement model trained on 1.05M real-world videos to master director-level cinematic planning. WanPE formulates shot-level cinematic plans via video-grounded reverse construction and employs Semantic-Consistency GRPO (SC-GRPO) to faithfully preserve user requirements across shots and over time. To benchmark this capability, we curate WanPEval, a human-annotated testbed covering durations from 5 to 30 seconds across varying intent granularities, supported by approximately 11K blind pairwise assessments. When powering Wan3.0's video generator, WanPE-397B boosts human preference over raw user prompts by 10.66-18.84 points at 5-15 seconds and by a dramatic 50.86 points in the 30-second arena. Ablation studies show that reverse construction demonstrates clear superiority over forward rewriting, while SC-GRPO robustly preserves semantic fidelity across model scales. Ultimately, WanPE leads all evaluated commercial offerings at 5-15 seconds and remains competitive with Seedance 2.5 at 30 seconds.
VidTutorAssistant automates answering programming tutorial questions accurately
VidTutorAssistant: Automating Responses to Programming Tutorial Questions
Abstract: Programming tutorial videos on YouTube are an important information resource for software developers and students, and their comment sections have evolved into active spaces where viewers ask follow-up questions. The volume of these questions, however, often exceeds what content creators can address, leaving learners without the clarifications they need. We present VidTutorAssistant, a web platform that automates responses to viewer questions on programming video tutorials. VidTutorAssistant implements a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that extracts a video's transcript, then segments it and embeds it. It then classifies each viewer comment as being a question or non-question, retrieves the most relevant transcript segments to each identified question via cosine similarity, and then generates an answer to the question using an LLM (GPT-4), while grounding the response using the retrieved transcript segments as context. We validate VidTutorAssistant through a study on a subset of 440 user comments selected from a larger dataset of 105,553 comments extracted from 7,522 Python and Java tutorials. VidTutorAssistant is evaluated on various criteria: a) its ability to identify the programming language in a video, achieving a 0.99 accuracy; b) its ability to classify comments into questions and non-questions, reaching a 0.96 accuracy; and c) its ability to produce correct and complete answers to questions, producing 98% correct and 99.5% complete responses, compared with 89% and 90% for the original creators' answers.
ViRDM improves few-step video generation without large teacher models
ViRDM: Taming Representation Distribution Matching for Few-Step Causal Video Generation
Abstract: Few-step autoregressive (AR) video diffusion enables low-latency streaming generation, but existing post-training methods predominantly rely on Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), requiring both a large pretrained teacher and an online critic to estimate distributional discrepancies through diffusion scores. In this work, we ask whether this resource-intensive teacher--critic stack can be eliminated by post-training only the generator against a precomputed target distribution. Drawing inspiration from representation distribution matching (RDM) for one-step image generation, we systematically study its transfer to few-step causal video generation and identify three key barriers: a memory-intractable gradient path, a distinct video optimization regime, and representation distributions that underconstrain temporal dynamics. We introduce ViRDM, a teacher- and critic-free video post-training recipe that addresses these barriers sequentially. By coupling RDM with stochastically truncated clean-exit supervision, a lightweight VAE decoder, and staged vector--Jacobian products, ViRDM makes representation distribution matching memory-feasible for multi-step causal video rollouts. We further establish effective generated-population and initialization regimes for video RDM, and introduce lightweight dynamics regularization to compensate for the underconstrained temporal dynamics. ViRDM turns three-network distillation into generator-only post-training, reducing GPU memory use and training time while improving video quality. With only 20 generator updates, the recipe reaches 84.87 on the official VBench evaluation, outperforming the previous best few-step causal baseline by 0.36, while requiring 16 A100 GPU-hours. We additionally report exploratory results demonstrating the potential of the same recipe for lower causal sampling budget and for one-, two-, and four-step bidirectional generation.
Video guides better audio and motion in multimodal generation
All modalities are equal, but video is more equal: Closing the Cross-Attention Gap in Joint Video Generation
Abstract: Video is a rich representation of a physical event, capturing appearance, geometry, motion, and temporal evolution. Other modalities, such as 3D body motion or audio, encode narrower aspects of the same event. We find that joint multimodal diffusion transformers exhibit a corresponding asymmetry in cross-modal correspondence: companion modalities develop strong correspondences to video, but the reciprocal correspondences through which they constrain video remain substantially weaker. We express both directions as comparable correspondence distributions over video tokens and define their disagreement as the reciprocal correspondence gap. We introduce RecCAR, standing for Reciprocal Cross-modal Attention Regularization, a KL regularizer that uses the well-established video-to-modality correspondence as a fixed reference and aligns the weaker modality-to-video correspondence toward it. Across joint video-motion and video-audio generation, RecCAR improves the Human Anatomy score from 0.69 to 0.75 and reduces audio-video desynchronization from 0.804 to 0.752, while improving overall generation
Video generation agents improve quality by using external tools
VideoGen-Agent: Reinforcing Video Generation Agents
Abstract: Recent advances in video generative models have enabled high-fidelity, temporally coherent video generation. However, these models often struggle to satisfy prompts requiring specialized knowledge, specific identities, physical consistency, or ordered events. In this paper, we present VideoGen-Agent, a multimodal agent trained through multitask agentic reinforcement learning to use external tools for video generation. The agent coordinates augmentation, generation, and verification tools through multi-turn interactions, using the prompt and intermediate observations to guide its decisions. We train a shared policy on a category-balanced dataset spanning six tasks. Supervised fine-tuning on teacher-generated trajectories establishes tool-use behavior, which is then refined through reinforcement learning. A category-aware hybrid reward evaluates tool-call validity, task-appropriate tool use, and generated video quality. We further introduce VABench, a held-out benchmark of 600 prompts covering procedural knowledge, single- and multi-entity identity preservation, physical consistency, scene composition, and multi-shot temporal structure. On VABench, VideoGen-Agent improves over its base text-to-video generator by 19.1 points, from 56.5 to 75.6. Upgrading the generation tools further raises the score to 86.1 without additional agent training. Human raters prefer the upgraded configuration over the strongest standalone baseline in 84.3% of comparisons. These results support learning tool use across video-generation tasks and show that the trained agent can benefit from subsequent advances in generation tools.
Multiple subject video generation uses separate image references
MSR: Multiple Subject Reference for Video Generation
Abstract: Conditioning a video generator on multiple images requires preserving appearance while associating each reference with its intended role. We present MSR (Multiple Subject Reference), a slot-aware conditioning scheme for LTX-based video generation. Each reference image is independently encoded as a static clip and represented by a separate latent-token group. A compact Fourier-feature multilayer perceptron adds a numeric slot embedding, while slot-dependent temporal offsets modify the group's rotary coordinates. The reference groups are prepended to noisy target tokens and serve as clean context during target-only flow-matching training. We implement this scheme through low-rank adaptation and release the resulting weights and inference workflows. Qualitative examples demonstrate compositions containing distinct characters and referenced environments in realistic and stylized scenes. Development observations suggest reduced reference confusion relative to an earlier continuous-reference baseline, while similar clothing, complex garments, and viewpoint changes remain challenging. We describe the conditioning mechanism, the retained training configuration, and the observed strengths and limitations of the released system. A supplementary audio-reference experiment adds voice conditioning while keeping the visual parameters frozen.
Minimax-H3 shows limited physical reasoning using multiple input types
Can MiniMax-H3 Reason About the Physical World? An Evaluation of Omni-Modal Generative Model
Abstract: Recent Omni-Modal Generative Models (Omni-Models) have advanced content generation toward unified modeling of text, images, video, and audio. MiniMax-H3 exemplifies this transition by combining multimodal context understanding with joint audio-visual generation in a shared latent framework. Its unified architecture raises a fundamental question: Can multimodal alignment improve the model's world reasoning, and what new evaluation paradigms do omni-modal inputs enable? To investigate this question, this work introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework organized around four complementary dimensions of physical world reasoning. Unlike existing evaluation frameworks for video generation and world models, which are often constrained by limited input modalities and evaluation settings where prompts closely match the target video content, our evaluation is specifically designed to exploit the multimodal inputs of Omni-Model. We construct a diverse set of novel tasks that require models to integrate complementary information across modalities. Specifically, we consider four scenarios, including implicit prompts paired with multiple frames, audio-image, prefix-videos, and audio-video inputs. Every single modality provides only partial evidence about the underlying event, requiring the model to jointly reason over the complementary semantic cues to infer latent event states and future dynamics. Across 517 evaluation instances, MiniMax-H3 achieves an overall success rate of 41.97%. Video-based Decision Reasoning yields the highest success rate at 56.00%, while Audio-based Disambiguation Reasoning is the weakest, reaching only 27.40%. These results indicate that effective multimodal integration remains key to fully exploiting the benefits of diverse input modalities. The project is available at https://github.com/gulucaptain/MiniMax-H3-Reason.
LynnReal-Omni enables controllable multimodal video generation with real-time speed
LynnReal-Omni: Native multi-modal Video Generation for Agentic Visual Workflows
Abstract: Video diffusion models are stochastic and hard to control: precise content often requires repeated sampling without guaranteed success, and long-horizon scenes drift in appearance, interactions, and temporal coherence. Agentic visual creation provides explicit references, editable 3D scenes, or executable game states for stable control, but does not by itself guarantee high object or character fidelity. Combining the two can enable stable, high-quality generation. To realize this combination, we present LynnReal-Omni, a native multimodal video generation framework built on a 32B shared multimodal diffusion transformer that unifies text-to-video, image-conditioned generation, reference-guided generation, structural control, editing, degraded video restoration, and long-video generation. It accepts heterogeneous visual inputs, including appearance references, editable 3D renders, and game recordings, allowing agents to compose visual conditions within a unified model. We also train a dedicated 27B Flash shared multimodal diffusion transformer for real-time rendering. We build a systematic data pipeline for video cleaning, subject association, multimodal annotation, and aligned control construction, yielding a curated corpus of multi-shot audiovisual segments, and introduce MSAVP, a 100-prompt, 20-metric evaluation design that separates instruction following, generating plausibility, visual quality, temporal behavior, and audio coordination. LynnReal-Omni-Flash further reduces inference cost through model and decoding acceleration, including a lightweight VAE decoder; on one H100, warm generation and decoding of a 22-frame 540p video take 843 ms with LynnReal-Omni and 377 ms with Flash. These results provide a foundation for real-time streaming video generation, making LynnReal-Omni a unified, controllable, and efficient basis for agentic visual creation.
CrossDistill improves diffusion model speed while keeping variety and detail
CrossDistill: Balancing Quality and Diversity via Trajectory-Level Hybrid Few-Step Distillation
Abstract: Few-step distillation accelerates diffusion models but must balance diversity and fidelity: trajectory-based distillation preserves mode coverage, while distribution matching sharpens samples but can reduce diversity. We show that this tension can be exploited in a noise-regime-dependent way: high-noise steps largely determine global modes, whereas low-noise steps refine local details. We propose CrossDistill, a trajectory-level hybrid distillation framework that splits the sampling trajectory at a crossover point, applies a trajectory-preserving objective on the high-noise interval and a distribution-matching objective on the low-noise interval, and couples the two stages through the crossover state. In contrast to loss-level mixing, and complementarily to training-time two-stage recipes, CrossDistill explicitly assigns complementary objectives along the noise axis, so that global branching is preserved before local statistics are sharpened. CrossDistill is a noise-level scheduling policy: PCM and DMD are plug-in instantiations, while the noise partition, crossover coupling, and objective ordering are the key design elements. Experiments on text-to-video diffusion models and qualitative image-to-video results show that CrossDistill expands the few-step quality-diversity frontier, retaining seed-level variation while achieving competitive visual fidelity.
SignRefine improves sign language video clarity using keypoint data
SignRefine: Adapting Foundational Video Models for Sign Language Generation
Abstract: Sign language video generation demands precise hand and facial articulation, yet modern video diffusion models, trained predominantly on spoken-language video, produce artifacts that render signing unintelligible. We propose SignRefine, a sign language video generation model that produces comprehensible signing from 2D keypoint conditioning alone, generalizing across appearances and visual conditions. Our approach builds on a pretrained video diffusion transformer and introduces local adapters with spatial grounding to selectively refine hand and face regions, steering the strong base model's prior toward accurate articulation. To enable this work and support broader sign language research, we present NVSign, a large-scale dataset of video content natively produced in sign language, offering diverse signer appearances, environments, and natural conversational settings. Trained on this data, our model shows up to 30% improvement in hand pose precision metrics over the strongest baseline and is preferred by sign language users for visual quality and comprehensibility in more than 80% of comparisons.