Towards One-step Causal Video Generation via Adversarial Self-Distillation
Yongqi Yang, Huayang Huang, Xu Peng, Xiaobin Hu, Donghao Luo, Jiangning Zhang, Chengjie Wang, Yu Wu
Abstract
Recent hybrid video generation models combine autoregressive temporal dynamics with diffusion-based spatial denoising, but their sequential, iterative nature leads to error accumulation and long inference times. In this work, we propose a distillation-based framework for efficient causal video generation that enables high-quality synthesis with extremely limited denoising steps. Our approach builds upon the Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) framework and proposes a novel Adversarial Self-Distillation (ASD) strategy, which aligns the outputs of the student model's n-step denoising process with its (n+1)-step version at the distribution level. This design provides smoother supervision by bridging small intra-student gaps and more informative guidance by combining teacher knowledge with locally consistent student behavior, substantially improving training stability and generation quality in extremely few-step scenarios (e.g., 1-2 steps). In addition, we present a First-Frame Enhancement (FFE) strategy, which allocates more denoising steps to the initial frames to mitigate error propagation while applying larger skipping steps to later frames. Extensive experiments on VBench demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in both one-step and two-step video generation. Notably, our framework produces a single distilled model that flexibly supports multiple inference-step settings, eliminating the need for repeated re-distillation and enabling efficient, high-quality video synthesis.
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Install the CLIlune papers fulltext 921d5ba0-748b-4a3d-90b7-e9f60082ea48Cited by top-tier papers3
- Causality in Video Diffusers is Separable from DenoisingXingjian Bai, Guande He, Zhengqi Li, Eli Shechtman et al.CVPR 2026 · 3 citations
- Restoring Initial Noise Sensitivity in Text-to-Image Distillation through Geometric Alignmenthuayang Huang, Ruoyu Wang, Jinhui Zhao, Wei Deng et al.ICML 2026
- Causal Forcing: Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation Done Right for High-Quality Real-Time Interactive Video GenerationHongzhou Zhu, Min Zhao, Guande He, Hang Su et al.ICML 2026
Builds on38
- Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic ModelsJonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, Pieter AbbeelNeurIPS 2020 · 35,902 citations
- Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image SynthesisPrafulla Dhariwal, Alexander Quinn NicholNeurIPS 2021 · 13,211 citations
- High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion ModelsRobin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, Patrick Esser et al.CVPR 2022 · 13,123 citations
- Denoising Diffusion Implicit ModelsJiaming Song, Chenlin Meng, Stefano ErmonICLR 2021 · 11,743 citations
- Scalable Diffusion Models with TransformersWilliam Peebles, Saining XieICCV 2023 · 5,568 citations
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