Alpha as an Efficiency Signal: Visibility-Routed RGBA Image-to-Video Generation
2026-08-10 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created a new large dataset of game-style RGBA videos (which have colors plus transparency) to help make better animated game assets. They designed a new video generator that creates both color images and transparency maps together more efficiently and with higher quality than older methods. To speed up processing, they developed a way to skip unnecessary calculations for transparent parts without losing quality. Their approach is faster and produces smoother animations compared to traditional two-step methods.
RGBA videoalpha channelvideo datasetgame assetsmattingvideo generationvisibility routerdenoisingflow matchingFVD (Fréchet Video Distance)
Authors
Zhe Li, Honghao Qiao, Zhixin Xu, Qijie Wang, Bo Peng, Dawei Li
Abstract
RGBA videos combine RGB appearance with an alpha channel, enabling animated assets to be applied across arbitrary backgrounds, which are heavily used in gaming industry. However, generating high-quality RGBA animations for games remains challenging for two reasons. First, most existing RGBA video datasets are dominated by photorealistic content, with limited coverage of game assets. Second, the traditional generate-then-matte pipelines estimate alpha only after RGB synthesis, so semi-transparent regions are often blurred by background, resulting in unstable matting outputs. More recently, many methods have begun to model RGB and alpha jointly, but existing approaches are mostly text-conditioned, and still have unresolved issues in efficiency and quality. To address these challenges, we introduce GameAlpha-2.4K, a 2.4K-clip game-style RGBA video dataset built with matte-friendly synthesis, multi-hypothesis alpha recovery, and compositing-based quality gates. Using this dataset, we train a reference-conditioned RGBA video generator that jointly produces RGB frames and alpha mattes in a single pass. To improve efficiency, we propose a visibility router that identifies transparent tokens in an early stage and bypasses their later DiT updates, while x_0-lock guides them along the original flow-matching schedule toward self-predicted endpoints. Our model obtains lower FVD than traditional two-stage pipelines, and the visibility router skips 35% of token evaluations in the final two DiT denoising steps, providing a 1.2x backbone speedup with negligible quality degradation compared to dense inference.