Self Gradient Forcing: Native Long Video Extrapolation

2026-07-22Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summary

The authors focus on improving video generation models that predict future frames based on previous ones. They identify a problem where the model doesn't learn how to better remember past frames for future predictions, which they call the historical context-gradient gap. To fix this, they introduce a new training method called Self Gradient Forcing (SGF) that helps the model learn to write better 'memories' by using two training passes without costly computations. Their approach leads to more consistent and stable long videos, even when training on short clips. The authors show SGF outperforms previous methods in maintaining things like subject identity and background over long video sequences.

autoregressive video generationvideo diffusion modelsself forcingcontext-gradient gapkey-value cachecausal attentionlatent representationlong-horizon video extrapolationdenoising step
Authors
Junhao Zhuang, Shiyi Zhang, Yuxuan Bian, Yaowei Li, Yawen Luo, Yijun Liu, Weiyang Jin, Songchun Zhang, Xianglong He, Xuying Zhang, Haoran Li, Haoyang Huang, Zeyue Xue, Nan Duan
Abstract
Recent autoregressive video diffusion methods are increasingly built upon Self Forcing, where the student is trained on histories produced by its own rollout rather than ground-truth video contexts. This reduces exposure bias, but the historical key-value cache is still used by future frames only as frozen rollout state. As a result, future losses cannot supervise how earlier generated latents should be written into more useful keys and values for later video-latent generation. We call this the historical context-gradient gap. We propose Self Gradient Forcing (SGF), a two-pass training strategy that restores this missing supervision signal without backpropagating through the full serial rollout. Pass 1 performs a no-gradient autoregressive rollout matching inference and, at a sampled denoising exit step, records both the self-generated context and the noisy latents fed to the model. Pass 2 performs parallel context-gradient reconstruction for the recorded exit step. The generated context is used as stop-gradient clean-latent input, while the model recomputes the context KV representations and future-to-context causal attention. Thus, SGF provides the missing memory-writing supervision within the native autoregressive training objective, using losses on future video latents to train the model to encode context into more effective causal memory. Across extensive long-horizon frame-wise and chunk-wise experiments under different initializations, SGF achieves stronger native long-video extrapolation than Self Forcing, especially in subject identity, background/layout consistency, and temporal stability. Remarkably, using only a 5-second training window, SGF can extrapolate to videos lasting several minutes. Code and models will be released to advance research on autoregressive video generation.