ICML2026

Video-SVD: Efficient Video Diffusion via Orthogonal Basis Composition

Zhang Wan, Yu Li, Tianze Huang, Haochen Li, Juan Cao, Sheng Tang

Abstract

Video Diffusion Transformers (VDiTs) represent the state of the art in video generation but remain constrained by the quadratic complexity of dense self-attention. To address this attention bottleneck, we analyze the pre-softmax matrix (QKQK^\top) and reveal two key properties: (1) video attention exhibits an effective low-dimensional structure with rapid singular-value decay, and (2) real motion induces hybrid spatio-temporal patterns rather than rigid ``spatial vs. temporal'' layouts. Guided by these observations, we propose Video-SVD, a training-free and plug-and-play acceleration method that does not modify the original network parameters. Video-SVD learns checkpoint-adaptive orthogonal bases offline and, at inference time, replaces expensive dense attention computation with lightweight online subspace projection and basis composition. To preserve high fidelity, Video-SVD further employs layer-shared dual-stream residual modules to recover fine-grained content details and positional information. Across HunyuanVideo and Wan2.1 backbones, Video-SVD achieves significant end-to-end speedups while maintaining high visual quality, reaching 1.92×\times on HunyuanVideo, 1.75×\times on Wan2.1-1.3B, and 1.79×\times on Wan2.1-14B.