V.I.P.: Iterative Online Preference Distillation for Efficient Video Diffusion Models

With growing interest in deploying text-to-video (T2V) models in resource-constrained environments, reducing their high computational cost has become crucial, leading to extensive research on pruning and knowledge distillation methods while maintaining performance. However, existing distillation methods primarily rely on supervised finetuning (SFT), which often leads to mode collapse as pruned models with reduced capacity fail to directly match the teacher's outputs, ultimately resulting in degraded quality. To address this challenge, we propose an effective distillation method, ReDPO, that integrates DPO and SFT. Our approach leverages DPO to guide the student model to focus on recovering only the targeted properties, rather than passively imitating the teacher, while also utilizing SFT to enhance overall performance. We additionally propose V.I.P., a novel framework for filtering and curating high-quality pair datasets, along with a step-by-step online approach for calibrated training. We validate our method on two leading T2V models, VideoCrafter2 and AnimateDiff, achieving parameter reduction of 36.2 % and 67.5 % each, while maintaining or even surpassing the performance of full models. Further experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of both ReDPO and V.I.P. framework in enabling efficient and highquality video generation. Our code and videos are available at https://jiiiisoo.github.io/VIP.github.io/.