Papers for
video software engineers
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.
Video generation speeds up by focusing on moving parts only
Dynamics-Aware Sparse Attention for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion
Abstract: Autoregressive Diffusion Transformers have emerged as a powerful paradigm for long video generation. However, they are often constrained by prohibitive computational overhead and substantial memory footprints. This inefficiency arises from dense computation mechanisms that allocate uniform processing resources across all spatiotemporal regions, failing to leverage the inherent temporal redundancy of video where motion is typically confined to sparse areas. In this paper, we propose Dynamics-Aware Sparse Attention (DASA), a unified framework that shifts from dense computation to sparse, motion-driven generation to eliminate both storage and computational redundancies. Inspired by video codec principles, our approach explicitly decouples video content into dynamic and static regions. To mitigate memory bottlenecks, we selectively compress the historical KV cache by retaining only dynamic features within the generated chunk. Furthermore, to reduce computational overhead, we employ a region-level computation allocation strategy based on localized dynamics. Additionally, a dynamics-guided distillation method is introduced to enhance performance via a lightweight distillation training process. Experiments on VBench demonstrate that our approach accelerates autoregressive video generation by 2.16x, while preserving high visual fidelity.
Prompt guided vision language models improve video recognition accuracy
Revisiting Natural Language Prompts from Large Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Video Recognition
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown great success in image tasks, however, applying CLIP to open-vocabulary video recognition poses challenges. Due to the limited text information, directly fine-tuning CLIP on video recognition datasets may lead to overfitting and hinder its generalizability. A prevalent method is to enrich text information by generating prompts using Large Language Models (LLMs). However, limited efforts have been made to explore how to generate higher-quality prompts that can contribute to classify unseen categories, and how to further enhance vision-text alignment based on these prompts. In this paper, we propose P2CLIP (Prompt-guided CLIP), which aims to bridge this gap by exploring the impact of prompts across three aspects: category, video, and frame. At the category level, we argue that LLM-generated prompts under simple instructions may suffer from semantic overgeneralization, which can blur the category boundaries and hinder the performance of the model. To address this issue, we design Generic-Discriminative Prompt using LLMs to obtain discriminative category embeddings with rich semantic information. At the video and frame levels, we first use VLM and LLM to generate frame and video descriptions for enhancing vision-text alignment. Then we propose a Knowledge-Guided Temporal Aggregation mechanism, which leverages the expert knowledge derived from LLMs to guide the temporal modeling of videos and encourage a better construction of the joint visual-textual feature space. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks, including zero-shot and few-shot settings, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Video generation memory usage cut by predictive cache compression
TempoKV: Predictive KV Cache Quantization for Autoregressive Video Generation
Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models enable streaming generation of long videos but suffer from significant memory overhead due to the rapidly growing KV cache. Existing KV cache quantization methods are primarily designed for LLMs and transfer poorly to video models, where activations exhibit different statistics and strong spatiotemporal redundancy. We observe that the video KV cache is largely predictable over time, with a clear asymmetry. Keys are highly predictable from their temporal history, while values depend primarily on the current key and need a short history of preceding values. Based on these observations, we propose \textbf{\method}, a training-free predictive KV cache quantization framework for AR video generation. \method predicts keys and values according to their distinct dependencies and stores only the residuals at low precision. Both predictors are lightweight, calibrated once offline by linear regression on a small set of BF16 samples, and remain fixed across prompts and generation runs. Experiments on Self-Forcing, Causal Forcing, and LongCat-Video-13B show that \method consistently achieves higher generation quality than existing KV cache quantization methods at comparable or higher compression ratios, reaching up to $6.71\times$ KV cache compression with the best overall quality--efficiency tradeoff. Our code will be released on GitHub.
Parameterized stripe attention speeds up video generation models
Parameterized Stripe Attention for Efficient Video Generation
Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) enable high-quality video generation but suffer from substantial inference latency, primarily attributable to the computationally expensive full spatio-temporal attention. While sparse attention methods offer potential solutions, existing approaches face an inherent flexibility--efficiency dilemma: predefined masks lack the flexibility to capture diverse attention patterns, while runtime-determined masks introduce overheads and sacrifice hardware efficiency. We identify the lack of a unified structural characterization of DiT attention as a key limitation of existing methods, and establish that video DiT attention exhibits \textbf{periodic diagonal stripe structures} along both temporal and spatial dimensions. To formally encode these structured patterns within a single efficient kernel, we present {\bf PSA}, a parameterized stripe attention that formalizes the observed stripe regularity, unifying diverse attention patterns for efficient mask generation. This unified representation enables a single hardware-efficient CUDA kernel to process all sparse patterns, achieving FlashAttention-3-level Model FLOPs Utilization. To determine optimal sparsity configurations, we propose a training-free offline search algorithm that automatically maximizes sparsity under a specified error tolerance for each attention head. Experiments on HunyuanVideo and Wan~2.1 demonstrate that PSA achieves 1.57$\times$ and 1.37$\times$ end-to-end speedups over FlashAttention-3 baselines, with acceptable visual quality degradation.