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May 6

Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report

We introduce Qwen2.5-VL, the latest flagship model of Qwen vision-language series, which demonstrates significant advancements in both foundational capabilities and innovative functionalities. Qwen2.5-VL achieves a major leap forward in understanding and interacting with the world through enhanced visual recognition, precise object localization, robust document parsing, and long-video comprehension. A standout feature of Qwen2.5-VL is its ability to localize objects using bounding boxes or points accurately. It provides robust structured data extraction from invoices, forms, and tables, as well as detailed analysis of charts, diagrams, and layouts. To handle complex inputs, Qwen2.5-VL introduces dynamic resolution processing and absolute time encoding, enabling it to process images of varying sizes and videos of extended durations (up to hours) with second-level event localization. This allows the model to natively perceive spatial scales and temporal dynamics without relying on traditional normalization techniques. By training a native dynamic-resolution Vision Transformer (ViT) from scratch and incorporating Window Attention, we reduce computational overhead while maintaining native resolution. As a result, Qwen2.5-VL excels not only in static image and document understanding but also as an interactive visual agent capable of reasoning, tool usage, and task execution in real-world scenarios such as operating computers and mobile devices. Qwen2.5-VL is available in three sizes, addressing diverse use cases from edge AI to high-performance computing. The flagship Qwen2.5-VL-72B model matches state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, particularly excelling in document and diagram understanding. Additionally, Qwen2.5-VL maintains robust linguistic performance, preserving the core language competencies of the Qwen2.5 LLM.

Large Motion Video Autoencoding with Cross-modal Video VAE

Learning a robust video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is essential for reducing video redundancy and facilitating efficient video generation. Directly applying image VAEs to individual frames in isolation can result in temporal inconsistencies and suboptimal compression rates due to a lack of temporal compression. Existing Video VAEs have begun to address temporal compression; however, they often suffer from inadequate reconstruction performance. In this paper, we present a novel and powerful video autoencoder capable of high-fidelity video encoding. First, we observe that entangling spatial and temporal compression by merely extending the image VAE to a 3D VAE can introduce motion blur and detail distortion artifacts. Thus, we propose temporal-aware spatial compression to better encode and decode the spatial information. Additionally, we integrate a lightweight motion compression model for further temporal compression. Second, we propose to leverage the textual information inherent in text-to-video datasets and incorporate text guidance into our model. This significantly enhances reconstruction quality, particularly in terms of detail preservation and temporal stability. Third, we further improve the versatility of our model through joint training on both images and videos, which not only enhances reconstruction quality but also enables the model to perform both image and video autoencoding. Extensive evaluations against strong recent baselines demonstrate the superior performance of our method. The project website can be found at~https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/{https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/}.

NIRVANA: Neural Implicit Representations of Videos with Adaptive Networks and Autoregressive Patch-wise Modeling

Implicit Neural Representations (INR) have recently shown to be powerful tool for high-quality video compression. However, existing works are limiting as they do not explicitly exploit the temporal redundancy in videos, leading to a long encoding time. Additionally, these methods have fixed architectures which do not scale to longer videos or higher resolutions. To address these issues, we propose NIRVANA, which treats videos as groups of frames and fits separate networks to each group performing patch-wise prediction. This design shares computation within each group, in the spatial and temporal dimensions, resulting in reduced encoding time of the video. The video representation is modeled autoregressively, with networks fit on a current group initialized using weights from the previous group's model. To further enhance efficiency, we perform quantization of the network parameters during training, requiring no post-hoc pruning or quantization. When compared with previous works on the benchmark UVG dataset, NIRVANA improves encoding quality from 37.36 to 37.70 (in terms of PSNR) and the encoding speed by 12X, while maintaining the same compression rate. In contrast to prior video INR works which struggle with larger resolution and longer videos, we show that our algorithm is highly flexible and scales naturally due to its patch-wise and autoregressive designs. Moreover, our method achieves variable bitrate compression by adapting to videos with varying inter-frame motion. NIRVANA achieves 6X decoding speed and scales well with more GPUs, making it practical for various deployment scenarios.

ChronoMagic-Bench: A Benchmark for Metamorphic Evaluation of Text-to-Time-lapse Video Generation

We propose a novel text-to-video (T2V) generation benchmark, ChronoMagic-Bench, to evaluate the temporal and metamorphic capabilities of the T2V models (e.g. Sora and Lumiere) in time-lapse video generation. In contrast to existing benchmarks that focus on the visual quality and textual relevance of generated videos, ChronoMagic-Bench focuses on the model's ability to generate time-lapse videos with significant metamorphic amplitude and temporal coherence. The benchmark probes T2V models for their physics, biology, and chemistry capabilities, in a free-form text query. For these purposes, ChronoMagic-Bench introduces 1,649 prompts and real-world videos as references, categorized into four major types of time-lapse videos: biological, human-created, meteorological, and physical phenomena, which are further divided into 75 subcategories. This categorization comprehensively evaluates the model's capacity to handle diverse and complex transformations. To accurately align human preference with the benchmark, we introduce two new automatic metrics, MTScore and CHScore, to evaluate the videos' metamorphic attributes and temporal coherence. MTScore measures the metamorphic amplitude, reflecting the degree of change over time, while CHScore assesses the temporal coherence, ensuring the generated videos maintain logical progression and continuity. Based on the ChronoMagic-Bench, we conduct comprehensive manual evaluations of ten representative T2V models, revealing their strengths and weaknesses across different categories of prompts, and providing a thorough evaluation framework that addresses current gaps in video generation research. Moreover, we create a large-scale ChronoMagic-Pro dataset, containing 460k high-quality pairs of 720p time-lapse videos and detailed captions ensuring high physical pertinence and large metamorphic amplitude.

LITA: Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant

There has been tremendous progress in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent works have extended these models to video input with promising instruction following capabilities. However, an important missing piece is temporal localization. These models cannot accurately answer the "When?" questions. We identify three key aspects that limit their temporal localization capabilities: (i) time representation, (ii) architecture, and (iii) data. We address these shortcomings by proposing Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant (LITA) with the following features: (1) We introduce time tokens that encode timestamps relative to the video length to better represent time in videos. (2) We introduce SlowFast tokens in the architecture to capture temporal information at fine temporal resolution. (3) We emphasize temporal localization data for LITA. In addition to leveraging existing video datasets with timestamps, we propose a new task, Reasoning Temporal Localization (RTL), along with the dataset, ActivityNet-RTL, for learning and evaluating this task. Reasoning temporal localization requires both the reasoning and temporal localization of Video LLMs. LITA demonstrates strong performance on this challenging task, nearly doubling the temporal mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of baselines. In addition, we show that our emphasis on temporal localization also substantially improves video-based text generation compared to existing Video LLMs, including a 36% relative improvement of Temporal Understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/LITA

HR-INR: Continuous Space-Time Video Super-Resolution via Event Camera

Continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) aims to simultaneously enhance video resolution and frame rate at an arbitrary scale. Recently, implicit neural representation (INR) has been applied to video restoration, representing videos as implicit fields that can be decoded at an arbitrary scale. However, the highly ill-posed nature of C-STVSR limits the effectiveness of current INR-based methods: they assume linear motion between frames and use interpolation or feature warping to generate features at arbitrary spatiotemporal positions with two consecutive frames. This restrains C-STVSR from capturing rapid and nonlinear motion and long-term dependencies (involving more than two frames) in complex dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel C-STVSR framework, called HR-INR, which captures both holistic dependencies and regional motions based on INR. It is assisted by an event camera, a novel sensor renowned for its high temporal resolution and low latency. To fully utilize the rich temporal information from events, we design a feature extraction consisting of (1) a regional event feature extractor - taking events as inputs via the proposed event temporal pyramid representation to capture the regional nonlinear motion and (2) a holistic event-frame feature extractor for long-term dependence and continuity motion. We then propose a novel INR-based decoder with spatiotemporal embeddings to capture long-term dependencies with a larger temporal perception field. We validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method on four datasets (both simulated and real data), showing the superiority of our method.

NAAQA: A Neural Architecture for Acoustic Question Answering

The goal of the Acoustic Question Answering (AQA) task is to answer a free-form text question about the content of an acoustic scene. It was inspired by the Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. In this paper, based on the previously introduced CLEAR dataset, we propose a new benchmark for AQA, namely CLEAR2, that emphasizes the specific challenges of acoustic inputs. These include handling of variable duration scenes, and scenes built with elementary sounds that differ between training and test set. We also introduce NAAQA, a neural architecture that leverages specific properties of acoustic inputs. The use of 1D convolutions in time and frequency to process 2D spectro-temporal representations of acoustic content shows promising results and enables reductions in model complexity. We show that time coordinate maps augment temporal localization capabilities which enhance performance of the network by ~17 percentage points. On the other hand, frequency coordinate maps have little influence on this task. NAAQA achieves 79.5% of accuracy on the AQA task with ~4 times fewer parameters than the previously explored VQA model. We evaluate the perfomance of NAAQA on an independent data set reconstructed from DAQA. We also test the addition of a MALiMo module in our model on both CLEAR2 and DAQA. We provide a detailed analysis of the results for the different question types. We release the code to produce CLEAR2 as well as NAAQA to foster research in this newly emerging machine learning task.

Vidi: Large Multimodal Models for Video Understanding and Editing

Humans naturally share information with those they are connected to, and video has become one of the dominant mediums for communication and expression on the Internet. To support the creation of high-quality large-scale video content, a modern pipeline requires a comprehensive understanding of both the raw input materials (e.g., the unedited footage captured by cameras) and the editing components (e.g., visual effects). In video editing scenarios, models must process multiple modalities (e.g., vision, audio, text) with strong background knowledge and handle flexible input lengths (e.g., hour-long raw videos), which poses significant challenges for traditional models. In this report, we introduce Vidi, a family of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for a wide range of video understand editing scenarios. The first release focuses on temporal retrieval, i.e., identifying the time ranges within the input videos corresponding to a given text query, which plays a critical role in intelligent editing. The model is capable of processing hour-long videos with strong temporal understanding capability, e.g., retrieve time ranges for certain queries. To support a comprehensive evaluation in real-world scenarios, we also present the VUE-TR benchmark, which introduces five key advancements. 1) Video duration: significantly longer than existing temporal retrival datasets, 2) Audio support: includes audio-based queries, 3) Query format: diverse query lengths/formats, 4) Annotation quality: ground-truth time ranges are manually annotated. 5) Evaluation metric: a refined IoU metric to support evaluation over multiple time ranges. Remarkably, Vidi significantly outperforms leading proprietary models, e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini, on the temporal retrieval task, indicating its superiority in video editing scenarios.

Clearer Frames, Anytime: Resolving Velocity Ambiguity in Video Frame Interpolation

Existing video frame interpolation (VFI) methods blindly predict where each object is at a specific timestep t ("time indexing"), which struggles to predict precise object movements. Given two images of a baseball, there are infinitely many possible trajectories: accelerating or decelerating, straight or curved. This often results in blurry frames as the method averages out these possibilities. Instead of forcing the network to learn this complicated time-to-location mapping implicitly together with predicting the frames, we provide the network with an explicit hint on how far the object has traveled between start and end frames, a novel approach termed "distance indexing". This method offers a clearer learning goal for models, reducing the uncertainty tied to object speeds. We further observed that, even with this extra guidance, objects can still be blurry especially when they are equally far from both input frames (i.e., halfway in-between), due to the directional ambiguity in long-range motion. To solve this, we propose an iterative reference-based estimation strategy that breaks down a long-range prediction into several short-range steps. When integrating our plug-and-play strategies into state-of-the-art learning-based models, they exhibit markedly sharper outputs and superior perceptual quality in arbitrary time interpolations, using a uniform distance indexing map in the same format as time indexing. Additionally, distance indexing can be specified pixel-wise, which enables temporal manipulation of each object independently, offering a novel tool for video editing tasks like re-timing.

Token-Efficient Long Video Understanding for Multimodal LLMs

Recent advances in video-based multimodal large language models (Video-LLMs) have significantly improved video understanding by processing videos as sequences of image frames. However, many existing methods treat frames independently in the vision backbone, lacking explicit temporal modeling, which limits their ability to capture dynamic patterns and efficiently handle long videos. To address these limitations, we introduce STORM (Spatiotemporal TOken Reduction for Multimodal LLMs), a novel architecture incorporating a dedicated temporal encoder between the image encoder and the LLM. Our temporal encoder leverages the Mamba State Space Model to integrate temporal information into image tokens, generating enriched representations that preserve inter-frame dynamics across the entire video sequence. This enriched encoding not only enhances video reasoning capabilities but also enables effective token reduction strategies, including test-time sampling and training-based temporal and spatial pooling, substantially reducing computational demands on the LLM without sacrificing key temporal information. By integrating these techniques, our approach simultaneously reduces training and inference latency while improving performance, enabling efficient and robust video understanding over extended temporal contexts. Extensive evaluations show that STORM achieves state-of-the-art results across various long video understanding benchmarks (more than 5\% improvement on MLVU and LongVideoBench) while reducing the computation costs by up to 8times and the decoding latency by 2.4-2.9times for the fixed numbers of input frames. Project page is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/storm

Multimodal Long Video Modeling Based on Temporal Dynamic Context

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to significant breakthroughs in video understanding. However, existing models still struggle with long video processing due to the context length constraint of LLMs and the vast amount of information within the video. Although some recent methods are designed for long video understanding, they often lose crucial information during token compression and struggle with additional modality like audio. In this work, we propose a dynamic long video encoding method utilizing the temporal relationship between frames, named Temporal Dynamic Context (TDC). Firstly, we segment the video into semantically consistent scenes based on inter-frame similarities, then encode each frame into tokens using visual-audio encoders. Secondly, we propose a novel temporal context compressor to reduce the number of tokens within each segment. Specifically, we employ a query-based Transformer to aggregate video, audio, and instruction text tokens into a limited set of temporal context tokens. Finally, we feed the static frame tokens and the temporal context tokens into the LLM for video understanding. Furthermore, to handle extremely long videos, we propose a training-free chain-of-thought strategy that progressively extracts answers from multiple video segments. These intermediate answers serve as part of the reasoning process and contribute to the final answer. We conduct extensive experiments on general video understanding and audio-video understanding benchmarks, where our method demonstrates strong performance. The code and models are available at https://github.com/Hoar012/TDC-Video.

MagicTime: Time-lapse Video Generation Models as Metamorphic Simulators

Recent advances in Text-to-Video generation (T2V) have achieved remarkable success in synthesizing high-quality general videos from textual descriptions. A largely overlooked problem in T2V is that existing models have not adequately encoded physical knowledge of the real world, thus generated videos tend to have limited motion and poor variations. In this paper, we propose MagicTime, a metamorphic time-lapse video generation model, which learns real-world physics knowledge from time-lapse videos and implements metamorphic generation. First, we design a MagicAdapter scheme to decouple spatial and temporal training, encode more physical knowledge from metamorphic videos, and transform pre-trained T2V models to generate metamorphic videos. Second, we introduce a Dynamic Frames Extraction strategy to adapt to metamorphic time-lapse videos, which have a wider variation range and cover dramatic object metamorphic processes, thus embodying more physical knowledge than general videos. Finally, we introduce a Magic Text-Encoder to improve the understanding of metamorphic video prompts. Furthermore, we create a time-lapse video-text dataset called ChronoMagic, specifically curated to unlock the metamorphic video generation ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of MagicTime for generating high-quality and dynamic metamorphic videos, suggesting time-lapse video generation is a promising path toward building metamorphic simulators of the physical world.

OD-VAE: An Omni-dimensional Video Compressor for Improving Latent Video Diffusion Model

Variational Autoencoder (VAE), compressing videos into latent representations, is a crucial preceding component of Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs). With the same reconstruction quality, the more sufficient the VAE's compression for videos is, the more efficient the LVDMs are. However, most LVDMs utilize 2D image VAE, whose compression for videos is only in the spatial dimension and often ignored in the temporal dimension. How to conduct temporal compression for videos in a VAE to obtain more concise latent representations while promising accurate reconstruction is seldom explored. To fill this gap, we propose an omni-dimension compression VAE, named OD-VAE, which can temporally and spatially compress videos. Although OD-VAE's more sufficient compression brings a great challenge to video reconstruction, it can still achieve high reconstructed accuracy by our fine design. To obtain a better trade-off between video reconstruction quality and compression speed, four variants of OD-VAE are introduced and analyzed. In addition, a novel tail initialization is designed to train OD-VAE more efficiently, and a novel inference strategy is proposed to enable OD-VAE to handle videos of arbitrary length with limited GPU memory. Comprehensive experiments on video reconstruction and LVDM-based video generation demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods.

VTG-LLM: Integrating Timestamp Knowledge into Video LLMs for Enhanced Video Temporal Grounding

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) focuses on accurately identifying event timestamps within a particular video based on a linguistic query, playing a vital role in downstream tasks such as video browsing and editing. While Video Large Language Models (video LLMs) have made significant progress in understanding video content, they often face challenges in accurately pinpointing timestamps within videos, which limits their performance on VTG tasks. Therefore, to improve video LLMs' ability to effectively locate timestamps, we argue that two critical aspects need to be enhanced. First, it is essential to have high-quality instructional tuning datasets that encompass mainstream VTG tasks. Second, directly incorporating timestamp knowledge into video LLMs is crucial, as it enables models to efficiently comprehend timestamp information. To address these needs, we first introduce VTG-IT-120K, a high-quality and comprehensive instruction tuning dataset that covers VTG tasks such as moment retrieval, dense video captioning, video summarization, and video highlight detection. Furthermore, we propose a specially designed video LLM model for VTG tasks, VTG-LLM, which (1) effectively integrates timestamp knowledge into visual tokens; (2) incorporates absolute-time tokens that specifically handle timestamp knowledge, thereby avoiding concept shifts; and (3) introduces a lightweight, high-performance slot-based token compression method to facilitate the sampling of more video frames. Comprehensive experiments showcase the superior performance of VTG-LLM in comparison to other video LLM methods across various VTG tasks. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/gyxxyg/VTG-LLM.

Temporal Feature Matters: A Framework for Diffusion Model Quantization

The Diffusion models, widely used for image generation, face significant challenges related to their broad applicability due to prolonged inference times and high memory demands. Efficient Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is crucial to address these issues. However, unlike traditional models, diffusion models critically rely on the time-step for the multi-round denoising. Typically, each time-step is encoded into a hypersensitive temporal feature by several modules. Despite this, existing PTQ methods do not optimize these modules individually. Instead, they employ unsuitable reconstruction objectives and complex calibration methods, leading to significant disturbances in the temporal feature and denoising trajectory, as well as reduced compression efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel quantization framework that includes three strategies: 1) TIB-based Maintenance: Based on our innovative Temporal Information Block (TIB) definition, Temporal Information-aware Reconstruction (TIAR) and Finite Set Calibration (FSC) are developed to efficiently align original temporal features. 2) Cache-based Maintenance: Instead of indirect and complex optimization for the related modules, pre-computing and caching quantized counterparts of temporal features are developed to minimize errors. 3) Disturbance-aware Selection: Employ temporal feature errors to guide a fine-grained selection between the two maintenance strategies for further disturbance reduction. This framework preserves most of the temporal information and ensures high-quality end-to-end generation. Extensive testing on various datasets, diffusion models and hardware confirms our superior performance and acceleration..

HiTVideo: Hierarchical Tokenizers for Enhancing Text-to-Video Generation with Autoregressive Large Language Models

Text-to-video generation poses significant challenges due to the inherent complexity of video data, which spans both temporal and spatial dimensions. It introduces additional redundancy, abrupt variations, and a domain gap between language and vision tokens while generation. Addressing these challenges requires an effective video tokenizer that can efficiently encode video data while preserving essential semantic and spatiotemporal information, serving as a critical bridge between text and vision. Inspired by the observation in VQ-VAE-2 and workflows of traditional animation, we propose HiTVideo for text-to-video generation with hierarchical tokenizers. It utilizes a 3D causal VAE with a multi-layer discrete token framework, encoding video content into hierarchically structured codebooks. Higher layers capture semantic information with higher compression, while lower layers focus on fine-grained spatiotemporal details, striking a balance between compression efficiency and reconstruction quality. Our approach efficiently encodes longer video sequences (e.g., 8 seconds, 64 frames), reducing bits per pixel (bpp) by approximately 70\% compared to baseline tokenizers, while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality. We explore the trade-offs between compression and reconstruction, while emphasizing the advantages of high-compressed semantic tokens in text-to-video tasks. HiTVideo aims to address the potential limitations of existing video tokenizers in text-to-video generation tasks, striving for higher compression ratios and simplify LLMs modeling under language guidance, offering a scalable and promising framework for advancing text to video generation. Demo page: https://ziqinzhou66.github.io/project/HiTVideo.

DiCoDe: Diffusion-Compressed Deep Tokens for Autoregressive Video Generation with Language Models

Videos are inherently temporal sequences by their very nature. In this work, we explore the potential of modeling videos in a chronological and scalable manner with autoregressive (AR) language models, inspired by their success in natural language processing. We introduce DiCoDe, a novel approach that leverages Diffusion-Compressed Deep Tokens to generate videos with a language model in an autoregressive manner. Unlike existing methods that employ low-level representations with limited compression rates, DiCoDe utilizes deep tokens with a considerable compression rate (a 1000x reduction in token count). This significant compression is made possible by a tokenizer trained through leveraging the prior knowledge of video diffusion models. Deep tokens enable DiCoDe to employ vanilla AR language models for video generation, akin to translating one visual "language" into another. By treating videos as temporal sequences, DiCoDe fully harnesses the capabilities of language models for autoregressive generation. DiCoDe is scalable using readily available AR architectures, and is capable of generating videos ranging from a few seconds to one minute using only 4 A100 GPUs for training. We evaluate DiCoDe both quantitatively and qualitatively, demonstrating that it performs comparably to existing methods in terms of quality while ensuring efficient training. To showcase its scalability, we release a series of DiCoDe configurations with varying parameter sizes and observe a consistent improvement in performance as the model size increases from 100M to 3B. We believe that DiCoDe's exploration in academia represents a promising initial step toward scalable video modeling with AR language models, paving the way for the development of larger and more powerful video generation models.

High-resolution Piano Transcription with Pedals by Regressing Onset and Offset Times

Automatic music transcription (AMT) is the task of transcribing audio recordings into symbolic representations. Recently, neural network-based methods have been applied to AMT, and have achieved state-of-the-art results. However, many previous systems only detect the onset and offset of notes frame-wise, so the transcription resolution is limited to the frame hop size. There is a lack of research on using different strategies to encode onset and offset targets for training. In addition, previous AMT systems are sensitive to the misaligned onset and offset labels of audio recordings. Furthermore, there are limited researches on sustain pedal transcription on large-scale datasets. In this article, we propose a high-resolution AMT system trained by regressing precise onset and offset times of piano notes. At inference, we propose an algorithm to analytically calculate the precise onset and offset times of piano notes and pedal events. We show that our AMT system is robust to the misaligned onset and offset labels compared to previous systems. Our proposed system achieves an onset F1 of 96.72% on the MAESTRO dataset, outperforming previous onsets and frames system of 94.80%. Our system achieves a pedal onset F1 score of 91.86\%, which is the first benchmark result on the MAESTRO dataset. We have released the source code and checkpoints of our work at https://github.com/bytedance/piano_transcription.

CV-VAE: A Compatible Video VAE for Latent Generative Video Models

Spatio-temporal compression of videos, utilizing networks such as Variational Autoencoders (VAE), plays a crucial role in OpenAI's SORA and numerous other video generative models. For instance, many LLM-like video models learn the distribution of discrete tokens derived from 3D VAEs within the VQVAE framework, while most diffusion-based video models capture the distribution of continuous latent extracted by 2D VAEs without quantization. The temporal compression is simply realized by uniform frame sampling which results in unsmooth motion between consecutive frames. Currently, there lacks of a commonly used continuous video (3D) VAE for latent diffusion-based video models in the research community. Moreover, since current diffusion-based approaches are often implemented using pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models, directly training a video VAE without considering the compatibility with existing T2I models will result in a latent space gap between them, which will take huge computational resources for training to bridge the gap even with the T2I models as initialization. To address this issue, we propose a method for training a video VAE of latent video models, namely CV-VAE, whose latent space is compatible with that of a given image VAE, e.g., image VAE of Stable Diffusion (SD). The compatibility is achieved by the proposed novel latent space regularization, which involves formulating a regularization loss using the image VAE. Benefiting from the latent space compatibility, video models can be trained seamlessly from pre-trained T2I or video models in a truly spatio-temporally compressed latent space, rather than simply sampling video frames at equal intervals. With our CV-VAE, existing video models can generate four times more frames with minimal finetuning. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed video VAE.

SAVEn-Vid: Synergistic Audio-Visual Integration for Enhanced Understanding in Long Video Context

Endeavors have been made to explore Large Language Models for video analysis (Video-LLMs), particularly in understanding and interpreting long videos. However, existing Video-LLMs still face challenges in effectively integrating the rich and diverse audio-visual information inherent in long videos, which is crucial for comprehensive understanding. This raises the question: how can we leverage embedded audio-visual information to enhance long video understanding? Therefore, (i) we introduce SAVEn-Vid, the first-ever long audio-visual video dataset comprising over 58k audio-visual instructions. (ii) From the model perspective, we propose a time-aware Audio-Visual Large Language Model (AV-LLM), SAVEnVideo, fine-tuned on SAVEn-Vid. (iii) Besides, we present AVBench, a benchmark containing 2,500 QAs designed to evaluate models on enhanced audio-visual comprehension tasks within long video, challenging their ability to handle intricate audio-visual interactions. Experiments on AVBench reveal the limitations of current AV-LLMs. Experiments also demonstrate that SAVEnVideo outperforms the best Video-LLM by 3.61% on the zero-shot long video task (Video-MME) and surpasses the leading audio-visual LLM by 1.29% on the zero-shot audio-visual task (Music-AVQA). Consequently, at the 7B parameter scale, SAVEnVideo can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our dataset and code will be released at https://ljungang.github.io/SAVEn-Vid/ upon acceptance.

When Video Coding Meets Multimodal Large Language Models: A Unified Paradigm for Video Coding

Existing codecs are designed to eliminate intrinsic redundancies to create a compact representation for compression. However, strong external priors from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have not been explicitly explored in video compression. Herein, we introduce a unified paradigm for Cross-Modality Video Coding (CMVC), which is a pioneering approach to explore multimodality representation and video generative models in video coding. Specifically, on the encoder side, we disentangle a video into spatial content and motion components, which are subsequently transformed into distinct modalities to achieve very compact representation by leveraging MLLMs. During decoding, previously encoded components and video generation models are leveraged to create multiple encoding-decoding modes that optimize video reconstruction quality for specific decoding requirements, including Text-Text-to-Video (TT2V) mode to ensure high-quality semantic information and Image-Text-to-Video (IT2V) mode to achieve superb perceptual consistency. In addition, we propose an efficient frame interpolation model for IT2V mode via Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) tuning to guarantee perceptual quality, which allows the generated motion cues to behave smoothly. Experiments on benchmarks indicate that TT2V achieves effective semantic reconstruction, while IT2V exhibits competitive perceptual consistency. These results highlight potential directions for future research in video coding.

Temporal Enhanced Training of Multi-view 3D Object Detector via Historical Object Prediction

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm, named Historical Object Prediction (HoP) for multi-view 3D detection to leverage temporal information more effectively. The HoP approach is straightforward: given the current timestamp t, we generate a pseudo Bird's-Eye View (BEV) feature of timestamp t-k from its adjacent frames and utilize this feature to predict the object set at timestamp t-k. Our approach is motivated by the observation that enforcing the detector to capture both the spatial location and temporal motion of objects occurring at historical timestamps can lead to more accurate BEV feature learning. First, we elaborately design short-term and long-term temporal decoders, which can generate the pseudo BEV feature for timestamp t-k without the involvement of its corresponding camera images. Second, an additional object decoder is flexibly attached to predict the object targets using the generated pseudo BEV feature. Note that we only perform HoP during training, thus the proposed method does not introduce extra overheads during inference. As a plug-and-play approach, HoP can be easily incorporated into state-of-the-art BEV detection frameworks, including BEVFormer and BEVDet series. Furthermore, the auxiliary HoP approach is complementary to prevalent temporal modeling methods, leading to significant performance gains. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HoP on the nuScenes dataset. We choose the representative methods, including BEVFormer and BEVDet4D-Depth to evaluate our method. Surprisingly, HoP achieves 68.5% NDS and 62.4% mAP with ViT-L on nuScenes test, outperforming all the 3D object detectors on the leaderboard. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Sense-X/HoP.

Frame-Recurrent Video Super-Resolution

Recent advances in video super-resolution have shown that convolutional neural networks combined with motion compensation are able to merge information from multiple low-resolution (LR) frames to generate high-quality images. Current state-of-the-art methods process a batch of LR frames to generate a single high-resolution (HR) frame and run this scheme in a sliding window fashion over the entire video, effectively treating the problem as a large number of separate multi-frame super-resolution tasks. This approach has two main weaknesses: 1) Each input frame is processed and warped multiple times, increasing the computational cost, and 2) each output frame is estimated independently conditioned on the input frames, limiting the system's ability to produce temporally consistent results. In this work, we propose an end-to-end trainable frame-recurrent video super-resolution framework that uses the previously inferred HR estimate to super-resolve the subsequent frame. This naturally encourages temporally consistent results and reduces the computational cost by warping only one image in each step. Furthermore, due to its recurrent nature, the proposed method has the ability to assimilate a large number of previous frames without increased computational demands. Extensive evaluations and comparisons with previous methods validate the strengths of our approach and demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to significantly outperform the current state of the art.

VideoGPT+: Integrating Image and Video Encoders for Enhanced Video Understanding

Building on the advances of language models, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have contributed significant improvements in video understanding. While the current video LMMs utilize advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), they rely on either image or video encoders to process visual inputs, each of which has its own limitations. Image encoders excel at capturing rich spatial details from frame sequences but lack explicit temporal context, which can be important in videos with intricate action sequences. On the other hand, video encoders provide temporal context but are often limited by computational constraints that lead to processing only sparse frames at lower resolutions, resulting in reduced contextual and spatial understanding. To this end, we introduce VideoGPT+, which combines the complementary benefits of the image encoder (for detailed spatial understanding) and the video encoder (for global temporal context modeling). The model processes videos by dividing them into smaller segments and applies an adaptive pooling strategy on features extracted by both image and video encoders. Our architecture showcases improved performance across multiple video benchmarks, including VCGBench, MVBench and Zero-shot question-answering. Further, we develop 112K video-instruction set using a novel semi-automatic annotation pipeline which further improves the model performance. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate video LMMs, we present VCGBench-Diverse, covering 18 broad video categories such as lifestyle, sports, science, gaming, and surveillance videos. This benchmark with 4,354 question-answer pairs evaluates the generalization of existing LMMs on dense video captioning, spatial and temporal understanding, and complex reasoning, ensuring comprehensive assessment across diverse video types and dynamics. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/VideoGPT-plus.

Mirasol3B: A Multimodal Autoregressive model for time-aligned and contextual modalities

One of the main challenges of multimodal learning is the need to combine heterogeneous modalities (e.g., video, audio, text). For example, video and audio are obtained at much higher rates than text and are roughly aligned in time. They are often not synchronized with text, which comes as a global context, e.g., a title, or a description. Furthermore, video and audio inputs are of much larger volumes, and grow as the video length increases, which naturally requires more compute dedicated to these modalities and makes modeling of long-range dependencies harder. We here decouple the multimodal modeling, dividing it into separate, focused autoregressive models, processing the inputs according to the characteristics of the modalities. We propose a multimodal model, called Mirasol3B, consisting of an autoregressive component for the time-synchronized modalities (audio and video), and an autoregressive component for the context modalities which are not necessarily aligned in time but are still sequential. To address the long-sequences of the video-audio inputs, we propose to further partition the video and audio sequences in consecutive snippets and autoregressively process their representations. To that end, we propose a Combiner mechanism, which models the audio-video information jointly within a timeframe. The Combiner learns to extract audio and video features from raw spatio-temporal signals, and then learns to fuse these features producing compact but expressive representations per snippet. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art on well established multimodal benchmarks, outperforming much larger models. It effectively addresses the high computational demand of media inputs by both learning compact representations, controlling the sequence length of the audio-video feature representations, and modeling their dependencies in time.

Lossless Compression with Probabilistic Circuits

Despite extensive progress on image generation, common deep generative model architectures are not easily applied to lossless compression. For example, VAEs suffer from a compression cost overhead due to their latent variables. This overhead can only be partially eliminated with elaborate schemes such as bits-back coding, often resulting in poor single-sample compression rates. To overcome such problems, we establish a new class of tractable lossless compression models that permit efficient encoding and decoding: Probabilistic Circuits (PCs). These are a class of neural networks involving |p| computational units that support efficient marginalization over arbitrary subsets of the D feature dimensions, enabling efficient arithmetic coding. We derive efficient encoding and decoding schemes that both have time complexity O (log(D) cdot |p|), where a naive scheme would have linear costs in D and |p|, making the approach highly scalable. Empirically, our PC-based (de)compression algorithm runs 5-40 times faster than neural compression algorithms that achieve similar bitrates. By scaling up the traditional PC structure learning pipeline, we achieve state-of-the-art results on image datasets such as MNIST. Furthermore, PCs can be naturally integrated with existing neural compression algorithms to improve the performance of these base models on natural image datasets. Our results highlight the potential impact that non-standard learning architectures may have on neural data compression.

No Time to Waste: Squeeze Time into Channel for Mobile Video Understanding

Current architectures for video understanding mainly build upon 3D convolutional blocks or 2D convolutions with additional operations for temporal modeling. However, these methods all regard the temporal axis as a separate dimension of the video sequence, which requires large computation and memory budgets and thus limits their usage on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose to squeeze the time axis of a video sequence into the channel dimension and present a lightweight video recognition network, term as SqueezeTime, for mobile video understanding. To enhance the temporal modeling capability of the proposed network, we design a Channel-Time Learning (CTL) Block to capture temporal dynamics of the sequence. This module has two complementary branches, in which one branch is for temporal importance learning and another branch with temporal position restoring capability is to enhance inter-temporal object modeling ability. The proposed SqueezeTime is much lightweight and fast with high accuracies for mobile video understanding. Extensive experiments on various video recognition and action detection benchmarks, i.e., Kinetics400, Kinetics600, HMDB51, AVA2.1 and THUMOS14, demonstrate the superiority of our model. For example, our SqueezeTime achieves +1.2% accuracy and +80% GPU throughput gain on Kinetics400 than prior methods. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/SqueezeTime and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/SqueezeTime.

Mavors: Multi-granularity Video Representation for Multimodal Large Language Model

Long-context video understanding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) faces a critical challenge: balancing computational efficiency with the retention of fine-grained spatio-temporal patterns. Existing approaches (e.g., sparse sampling, dense sampling with low resolution, and token compression) suffer from significant information loss in temporal dynamics, spatial details, or subtle interactions, particularly in videos with complex motion or varying resolutions. To address this, we propose Mavors, a novel framework that introduces Multi-granularity video representation for holistic long-video modeling. Specifically, Mavors directly encodes raw video content into latent representations through two core components: 1) an Intra-chunk Vision Encoder (IVE) that preserves high-resolution spatial features via 3D convolutions and Vision Transformers, and 2) an Inter-chunk Feature Aggregator (IFA) that establishes temporal coherence across chunks using transformer-based dependency modeling with chunk-level rotary position encodings. Moreover, the framework unifies image and video understanding by treating images as single-frame videos via sub-image decomposition. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate Mavors' superiority in maintaining both spatial fidelity and temporal continuity, significantly outperforming existing methods in tasks requiring fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning.

Boosting Neural Representations for Videos with a Conditional Decoder

Implicit neural representations (INRs) have emerged as a promising approach for video storage and processing, showing remarkable versatility across various video tasks. However, existing methods often fail to fully leverage their representation capabilities, primarily due to inadequate alignment of intermediate features during target frame decoding. This paper introduces a universal boosting framework for current implicit video representation approaches. Specifically, we utilize a conditional decoder with a temporal-aware affine transform module, which uses the frame index as a prior condition to effectively align intermediate features with target frames. Besides, we introduce a sinusoidal NeRV-like block to generate diverse intermediate features and achieve a more balanced parameter distribution, thereby enhancing the model's capacity. With a high-frequency information-preserving reconstruction loss, our approach successfully boosts multiple baseline INRs in the reconstruction quality and convergence speed for video regression, and exhibits superior inpainting and interpolation results. Further, we integrate a consistent entropy minimization technique and develop video codecs based on these boosted INRs. Experiments on the UVG dataset confirm that our enhanced codecs significantly outperform baseline INRs and offer competitive rate-distortion performance compared to traditional and learning-based codecs.

Exploring Temporally-Aware Features for Point Tracking

Point tracking in videos is a fundamental task with applications in robotics, video editing, and more. While many vision tasks benefit from pre-trained feature backbones to improve generalizability, point tracking has primarily relied on simpler backbones trained from scratch on synthetic data, which may limit robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, point tracking requires temporal awareness to ensure coherence across frames, but using temporally-aware features is still underexplored. Most current methods often employ a two-stage process: an initial coarse prediction followed by a refinement stage to inject temporal information and correct errors from the coarse stage. These approach, however, is computationally expensive and potentially redundant if the feature backbone itself captures sufficient temporal information. In this work, we introduce Chrono, a feature backbone specifically designed for point tracking with built-in temporal awareness. Leveraging pre-trained representations from self-supervised learner DINOv2 and enhanced with a temporal adapter, Chrono effectively captures long-term temporal context, enabling precise prediction even without the refinement stage. Experimental results demonstrate that Chrono achieves state-of-the-art performance in a refiner-free setting on the TAP-Vid-DAVIS and TAP-Vid-Kinetics datasets, among common feature backbones used in point tracking as well as DINOv2, with exceptional efficiency. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/Chrono/

Enhancing Low-Cost Video Editing with Lightweight Adaptors and Temporal-Aware Inversion

Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generation using diffusion models have enabled cost-effective video-editing applications by leveraging pre-trained models, eliminating the need for resource-intensive training. However, the frame-independence of T2I generation often results in poor temporal consistency. Existing methods address this issue through temporal layer fine-tuning or inference-based temporal propagation, but these approaches suffer from high training costs or limited temporal coherence. To address these challenges, we propose a General and Efficient Adapter (GE-Adapter) that integrates temporal-spatial and semantic consistency with Baliteral DDIM inversion. This framework introduces three key components: (1) Frame-based Temporal Consistency Blocks (FTC Blocks) to capture frame-specific features and enforce smooth inter-frame transitions via temporally-aware loss functions; (2) Channel-dependent Spatial Consistency Blocks (SCD Blocks) employing bilateral filters to enhance spatial coherence by reducing noise and artifacts; and (3) Token-based Semantic Consistency Module (TSC Module) to maintain semantic alignment using shared prompt tokens and frame-specific tokens. Our method significantly improves perceptual quality, text-image alignment, and temporal coherence, as demonstrated on the MSR-VTT dataset. Additionally, it achieves enhanced fidelity and frame-to-frame coherence, offering a practical solution for T2V editing.

APNet: An All-Frame-Level Neural Vocoder Incorporating Direct Prediction of Amplitude and Phase Spectra

This paper presents a novel neural vocoder named APNet which reconstructs speech waveforms from acoustic features by predicting amplitude and phase spectra directly. The APNet vocoder is composed of an amplitude spectrum predictor (ASP) and a phase spectrum predictor (PSP). The ASP is a residual convolution network which predicts frame-level log amplitude spectra from acoustic features. The PSP also adopts a residual convolution network using acoustic features as input, then passes the output of this network through two parallel linear convolution layers respectively, and finally integrates into a phase calculation formula to estimate frame-level phase spectra. Finally, the outputs of ASP and PSP are combined to reconstruct speech waveforms by inverse short-time Fourier transform (ISTFT). All operations of the ASP and PSP are performed at the frame level. We train the ASP and PSP jointly and define multilevel loss functions based on amplitude mean square error, phase anti-wrapping error, short-time spectral inconsistency error and time domain reconstruction error. Experimental results show that our proposed APNet vocoder achieves an approximately 8x faster inference speed than HiFi-GAN v1 on a CPU due to the all-frame-level operations, while its synthesized speech quality is comparable to HiFi-GAN v1. The synthesized speech quality of the APNet vocoder is also better than that of several equally efficient models. Ablation experiments also confirm that the proposed parallel phase estimation architecture is essential to phase modeling and the proposed loss functions are helpful for improving the synthesized speech quality.

VideoFactory: Swap Attention in Spatiotemporal Diffusions for Text-to-Video Generation

We present VideoFactory, an innovative framework for generating high-quality open-domain videos. VideoFactory excels in producing high-definition (1376x768), widescreen (16:9) videos without watermarks, creating an engaging user experience. Generating videos guided by text instructions poses significant challenges, such as modeling the complex relationship between space and time, and the lack of large-scale text-video paired data. Previous approaches extend pretrained text-to-image generation models by adding temporal 1D convolution/attention modules for video generation. However, these approaches overlook the importance of jointly modeling space and time, inevitably leading to temporal distortions and misalignment between texts and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that strengthens the interaction between spatial and temporal perceptions. In particular, we utilize a swapped cross-attention mechanism in 3D windows that alternates the "query" role between spatial and temporal blocks, enabling mutual reinforcement for each other. To fully unlock model capabilities for high-quality video generation, we curate a large-scale video dataset called HD-VG-130M. This dataset comprises 130 million text-video pairs from the open-domain, ensuring high-definition, widescreen and watermark-free characters. Objective metrics and user studies demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of per-frame quality, temporal correlation, and text-video alignment, with clear margins.

VideoDirector: Precise Video Editing via Text-to-Video Models

Despite the typical inversion-then-editing paradigm using text-to-image (T2I) models has demonstrated promising results, directly extending it to text-to-video (T2V) models still suffers severe artifacts such as color flickering and content distortion. Consequently, current video editing methods primarily rely on T2I models, which inherently lack temporal-coherence generative ability, often resulting in inferior editing results. In this paper, we attribute the failure of the typical editing paradigm to: 1) Tightly Spatial-temporal Coupling. The vanilla pivotal-based inversion strategy struggles to disentangle spatial-temporal information in the video diffusion model; 2) Complicated Spatial-temporal Layout. The vanilla cross-attention control is deficient in preserving the unedited content. To address these limitations, we propose a spatial-temporal decoupled guidance (STDG) and multi-frame null-text optimization strategy to provide pivotal temporal cues for more precise pivotal inversion. Furthermore, we introduce a self-attention control strategy to maintain higher fidelity for precise partial content editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method (termed VideoDirector) effectively harnesses the powerful temporal generation capabilities of T2V models, producing edited videos with state-of-the-art performance in accuracy, motion smoothness, realism, and fidelity to unedited content.

LV-MAE: Learning Long Video Representations through Masked-Embedding Autoencoders

In this work, we introduce long-video masked-embedding autoencoders (LV-MAE), a self-supervised learning framework for long video representation. Our approach treats short- and long-span dependencies as two separate tasks. Such decoupling allows for a more intuitive video processing where short-span spatiotemporal primitives are first encoded and are then used to capture long-range dependencies across consecutive video segments. To achieve this, we leverage advanced off-the-shelf multimodal encoders to extract representations from short segments within the long video, followed by pre-training a masked-embedding autoencoder capturing high-level interactions across segments. LV-MAE is highly efficient to train and enables the processing of much longer videos by alleviating the constraint on the number of input frames. Furthermore, unlike existing methods that typically pre-train on short-video datasets, our approach offers self-supervised pre-training using long video samples (e.g., 20+ minutes video clips) at scale. Using LV-MAE representations, we achieve state-of-the-art results on three long-video benchmarks -- LVU, COIN, and Breakfast -- employing only a simple classification head for either attentive or linear probing. Finally, to assess LV-MAE pre-training and visualize its reconstruction quality, we leverage the video-language aligned space of short video representations to monitor LV-MAE through video-text retrieval.

Streaming Long Video Understanding with Large Language Models

This paper presents VideoStreaming, an advanced vision-language large model (VLLM) for video understanding, that capably understands arbitrary-length video with a constant number of video tokens streamingly encoded and adaptively selected. The challenge of video understanding in the vision language area mainly lies in the significant computational burden caused by the great number of tokens extracted from long videos. Previous works rely on sparse sampling or frame compression to reduce tokens. However, such approaches either disregard temporal information in a long time span or sacrifice spatial details, resulting in flawed compression. To address these limitations, our VideoStreaming has two core designs: Memory-Propagated Streaming Encoding and Adaptive Memory Selection. The Memory-Propagated Streaming Encoding architecture segments long videos into short clips and sequentially encodes each clip with a propagated memory. In each iteration, we utilize the encoded results of the preceding clip as historical memory, which is integrated with the current clip to distill a condensed representation that encapsulates the video content up to the current timestamp. After the encoding process, the Adaptive Memory Selection strategy selects a constant number of question-related memories from all the historical memories and feeds them into the LLM to generate informative responses. The question-related selection reduces redundancy within the memories, enabling efficient and precise video understanding. Meanwhile, the disentangled video extraction and reasoning design allows the LLM to answer different questions about a video by directly selecting corresponding memories, without the need to encode the whole video for each question. Our model achieves superior performance and higher efficiency on long video benchmarks, showcasing precise temporal comprehension for detailed question answering.

Music Transformer

Music relies heavily on repetition to build structure and meaning. Self-reference occurs on multiple timescales, from motifs to phrases to reusing of entire sections of music, such as in pieces with ABA structure. The Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017), a sequence model based on self-attention, has achieved compelling results in many generation tasks that require maintaining long-range coherence. This suggests that self-attention might also be well-suited to modeling music. In musical composition and performance, however, relative timing is critically important. Existing approaches for representing relative positional information in the Transformer modulate attention based on pairwise distance (Shaw et al., 2018). This is impractical for long sequences such as musical compositions since their memory complexity for intermediate relative information is quadratic in the sequence length. We propose an algorithm that reduces their intermediate memory requirement to linear in the sequence length. This enables us to demonstrate that a Transformer with our modified relative attention mechanism can generate minute-long compositions (thousands of steps, four times the length modeled in Oore et al., 2018) with compelling structure, generate continuations that coherently elaborate on a given motif, and in a seq2seq setup generate accompaniments conditioned on melodies. We evaluate the Transformer with our relative attention mechanism on two datasets, JSB Chorales and Piano-e-Competition, and obtain state-of-the-art results on the latter.

TFMQ-DM: Temporal Feature Maintenance Quantization for Diffusion Models

The Diffusion model, a prevalent framework for image generation, encounters significant challenges in terms of broad applicability due to its extended inference times and substantial memory requirements. Efficient Post-training Quantization (PTQ) is pivotal for addressing these issues in traditional models. Different from traditional models, diffusion models heavily depend on the time-step t to achieve satisfactory multi-round denoising. Usually, t from the finite set {1, ldots, T} is encoded to a temporal feature by a few modules totally irrespective of the sampling data. However, existing PTQ methods do not optimize these modules separately. They adopt inappropriate reconstruction targets and complex calibration methods, resulting in a severe disturbance of the temporal feature and denoising trajectory, as well as a low compression efficiency. To solve these, we propose a Temporal Feature Maintenance Quantization (TFMQ) framework building upon a Temporal Information Block which is just related to the time-step t and unrelated to the sampling data. Powered by the pioneering block design, we devise temporal information aware reconstruction (TIAR) and finite set calibration (FSC) to align the full-precision temporal features in a limited time. Equipped with the framework, we can maintain the most temporal information and ensure the end-to-end generation quality. Extensive experiments on various datasets and diffusion models prove our state-of-the-art results. Remarkably, our quantization approach, for the first time, achieves model performance nearly on par with the full-precision model under 4-bit weight quantization. Additionally, our method incurs almost no extra computational cost and accelerates quantization time by 2.0 times on LSUN-Bedrooms 256 times 256 compared to previous works.

OVO-Bench: How Far is Your Video-LLMs from Real-World Online Video Understanding?

Temporal Awareness, the ability to reason dynamically based on the timestamp when a question is raised, is the key distinction between offline and online video LLMs. Unlike offline models, which rely on complete videos for static, post hoc analysis, online models process video streams incrementally and dynamically adapt their responses based on the timestamp at which the question is posed. Despite its significance, temporal awareness has not been adequately evaluated in existing benchmarks. To fill this gap, we present OVO-Bench (Online-VideO-Benchmark), a novel video benchmark that emphasizes the importance of timestamps for advanced online video understanding capability benchmarking. OVO-Bench evaluates the ability of video LLMs to reason and respond to events occurring at specific timestamps under three distinct scenarios: (1) Backward tracing: trace back to past events to answer the question. (2) Real-time understanding: understand and respond to events as they unfold at the current timestamp. (3) Forward active responding: delay the response until sufficient future information becomes available to answer the question accurately. OVO-Bench comprises 12 tasks, featuring 644 unique videos and approximately human-curated 2,800 fine-grained meta-annotations with precise timestamps. We combine automated generation pipelines with human curation. With these high-quality samples, we further developed an evaluation pipeline to systematically query video LLMs along the video timeline. Evaluations of nine Video-LLMs reveal that, despite advancements on traditional benchmarks, current models struggle with online video understanding, showing a significant gap compared to human agents. We hope OVO-Bench will drive progress in video LLMs and inspire future research in online video reasoning. Our benchmark and code can be accessed at https://github.com/JoeLeelyf/OVO-Bench.

Multi-Track Timeline Control for Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Generation

Recent advances in generative modeling have led to promising progress on synthesizing 3D human motion from text, with methods that can generate character animations from short prompts and specified durations. However, using a single text prompt as input lacks the fine-grained control needed by animators, such as composing multiple actions and defining precise durations for parts of the motion. To address this, we introduce the new problem of timeline control for text-driven motion synthesis, which provides an intuitive, yet fine-grained, input interface for users. Instead of a single prompt, users can specify a multi-track timeline of multiple prompts organized in temporal intervals that may overlap. This enables specifying the exact timings of each action and composing multiple actions in sequence or at overlapping intervals. To generate composite animations from a multi-track timeline, we propose a new test-time denoising method. This method can be integrated with any pre-trained motion diffusion model to synthesize realistic motions that accurately reflect the timeline. At every step of denoising, our method processes each timeline interval (text prompt) individually, subsequently aggregating the predictions with consideration for the specific body parts engaged in each action. Experimental comparisons and ablations validate that our method produces realistic motions that respect the semantics and timing of given text prompts. Our code and models are publicly available at https://mathis.petrovich.fr/stmc.

SemantiCodec: An Ultra Low Bitrate Semantic Audio Codec for General Sound

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced audio processing through audio codecs that convert audio into discrete tokens, enabling the application of language modelling techniques to audio data. However, traditional codecs often operate at high bitrates or within narrow domains such as speech and lack the semantic clues required for efficient language modelling. Addressing these challenges, we introduce SemantiCodec, a novel codec designed to compress audio into fewer than a hundred tokens per second across diverse audio types, including speech, general audio, and music, without compromising quality. SemantiCodec features a dual-encoder architecture: a semantic encoder using a self-supervised AudioMAE, discretized using k-means clustering on extensive audio data, and an acoustic encoder to capture the remaining details. The semantic and acoustic encoder outputs are used to reconstruct audio via a diffusion-model-based decoder. SemantiCodec is presented in three variants with token rates of 25, 50, and 100 per second, supporting a range of ultra-low bit rates between 0.31 kbps and 1.43 kbps. Experimental results demonstrate that SemantiCodec significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art Descript codec on reconstruction quality. Our results also suggest that SemantiCodec contains significantly richer semantic information than all evaluated audio codecs, even at significantly lower bitrates. Our code and demos are available at https://haoheliu.github.io/SemantiCodec/.

Disentangling Spatial and Temporal Learning for Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

Learning Disentangled Representations for Time Series

Time-series representation learning is a fundamental task for time-series analysis. While significant progress has been made to achieve accurate representations for downstream applications, the learned representations often lack interpretability and do not expose semantic meanings. Different from previous efforts on the entangled feature space, we aim to extract the semantic-rich temporal correlations in the latent interpretable factorized representation of the data. Motivated by the success of disentangled representation learning in computer vision, we study the possibility of learning semantic-rich time-series representations, which remains unexplored due to three main challenges: 1) sequential data structure introduces complex temporal correlations and makes the latent representations hard to interpret, 2) sequential models suffer from KL vanishing problem, and 3) interpretable semantic concepts for time-series often rely on multiple factors instead of individuals. To bridge the gap, we propose Disentangle Time Series (DTS), a novel disentanglement enhancement framework for sequential data. Specifically, to generate hierarchical semantic concepts as the interpretable and disentangled representation of time-series, DTS introduces multi-level disentanglement strategies by covering both individual latent factors and group semantic segments. We further theoretically show how to alleviate the KL vanishing problem: DTS introduces a mutual information maximization term, while preserving a heavier penalty on the total correlation and the dimension-wise KL to keep the disentanglement property. Experimental results on various real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the representations learned by DTS achieve superior performance in downstream applications, with high interpretability of semantic concepts.

Video-Panda: Parameter-efficient Alignment for Encoder-free Video-Language Models

We present an efficient encoder-free approach for video-language understanding that achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. Current video-language models typically rely on heavyweight image encoders (300M-1.1B parameters) or video encoders (1B-1.4B parameters), creating a substantial computational burden when processing multi-frame videos. Our method introduces a novel Spatio-Temporal Alignment Block (STAB) that directly processes video inputs without requiring pre-trained encoders while using only 45M parameters for visual processing - at least a 6.5times reduction compared to traditional approaches. The STAB architecture combines Local Spatio-Temporal Encoding for fine-grained feature extraction, efficient spatial downsampling through learned attention and separate mechanisms for modeling frame-level and video-level relationships. Our model achieves comparable or superior performance to encoder-based approaches for open-ended video question answering on standard benchmarks. The fine-grained video question-answering evaluation demonstrates our model's effectiveness, outperforming the encoder-based approaches Video-ChatGPT and Video-LLaVA in key aspects like correctness and temporal understanding. Extensive ablation studies validate our architectural choices and demonstrate the effectiveness of our spatio-temporal modeling approach while achieving 3-4times faster processing speeds than previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jh-yi/Video-Panda.

Faster Diffusion: Rethinking the Role of UNet Encoder in Diffusion Models

One of the key components within diffusion models is the UNet for noise prediction. While several works have explored basic properties of the UNet decoder, its encoder largely remains unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive study of the UNet encoder. We empirically analyze the encoder features and provide insights to important questions regarding their changes at the inference process. In particular, we find that encoder features change gently, whereas the decoder features exhibit substantial variations across different time-steps. This finding inspired us to omit the encoder at certain adjacent time-steps and reuse cyclically the encoder features in the previous time-steps for the decoder. Further based on this observation, we introduce a simple yet effective encoder propagation scheme to accelerate the diffusion sampling for a diverse set of tasks. By benefiting from our propagation scheme, we are able to perform in parallel the decoder at certain adjacent time-steps. Additionally, we introduce a prior noise injection method to improve the texture details in the generated image. Besides the standard text-to-image task, we also validate our approach on other tasks: text-to-video, personalized generation and reference-guided generation. Without utilizing any knowledge distillation technique, our approach accelerates both the Stable Diffusion (SD) and the DeepFloyd-IF models sampling by 41% and 24% respectively, while maintaining high-quality generation performance. Our code is available in https://github.com/hutaiHang/Faster-Diffusion{FasterDiffusion}.

Neural Video Compression with Feature Modulation

The emerging conditional coding-based neural video codec (NVC) shows superiority over commonly-used residual coding-based codec and the latest NVC already claims to outperform the best traditional codec. However, there still exist critical problems blocking the practicality of NVC. In this paper, we propose a powerful conditional coding-based NVC that solves two critical problems via feature modulation. The first is how to support a wide quality range in a single model. Previous NVC with this capability only supports about 3.8 dB PSNR range on average. To tackle this limitation, we modulate the latent feature of the current frame via the learnable quantization scaler. During the training, we specially design the uniform quantization parameter sampling mechanism to improve the harmonization of encoding and quantization. This results in a better learning of the quantization scaler and helps our NVC support about 11.4 dB PSNR range. The second is how to make NVC still work under a long prediction chain. We expose that the previous SOTA NVC has an obvious quality degradation problem when using a large intra-period setting. To this end, we propose modulating the temporal feature with a periodically refreshing mechanism to boost the quality. %Besides solving the above two problems, we also design a single model that can support both RGB and YUV colorspaces. Notably, under single intra-frame setting, our codec can achieve 29.7\% bitrate saving over previous SOTA NVC with 16\% MACs reduction. Our codec serves as a notable landmark in the journey of NVC evolution. The codes are at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.

Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer for Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Audio language models have recently emerged as a promising approach for various audio generation tasks, relying on audio tokenizers to encode waveforms into sequences of discrete symbols. Audio tokenization often poses a necessary compromise between code bitrate and reconstruction accuracy. When dealing with low-bitrate audio codes, language models are constrained to process only a subset of the information embedded in the audio, which in turn restricts their generative capabilities. To circumvent these issues, we propose encoding audio as vector sequences in continuous space mathbb R^d and autoregressively generating these sequences using a decoder-only diffusion transformer (ARDiT). Our findings indicate that ARDiT excels in zero-shot text-to-speech and exhibits performance that compares to or even surpasses that of state-of-the-art models. High-bitrate continuous speech representation enables almost flawless reconstruction, allowing our model to achieve nearly perfect speech editing. Our experiments reveal that employing Integral Kullback-Leibler (IKL) divergence for distillation at each autoregressive step significantly boosts the perceived quality of the samples. Simultaneously, it condenses the iterative sampling process of the diffusion model into a single step. Furthermore, ARDiT can be trained to predict several continuous vectors in one step, significantly reducing latency during sampling. Impressively, one of our models can generate 170 ms of 24 kHz speech per evaluation step with minimal degradation in performance. Audio samples are available at http://ardit-tts.github.io/ .

PeriodWave: Multi-Period Flow Matching for High-Fidelity Waveform Generation

Recently, universal waveform generation tasks have been investigated conditioned on various out-of-distribution scenarios. Although GAN-based methods have shown their strength in fast waveform generation, they are vulnerable to train-inference mismatch scenarios such as two-stage text-to-speech. Meanwhile, diffusion-based models have shown their powerful generative performance in other domains; however, they stay out of the limelight due to slow inference speed in waveform generation tasks. Above all, there is no generator architecture that can explicitly disentangle the natural periodic features of high-resolution waveform signals. In this paper, we propose PeriodWave, a novel universal waveform generation model. First, we introduce a period-aware flow matching estimator that can capture the periodic features of the waveform signal when estimating the vector fields. Additionally, we utilize a multi-period estimator that avoids overlaps to capture different periodic features of waveform signals. Although increasing the number of periods can improve the performance significantly, this requires more computational costs. To reduce this issue, we also propose a single period-conditional universal estimator that can feed-forward parallel by period-wise batch inference. Additionally, we utilize discrete wavelet transform to losslessly disentangle the frequency information of waveform signals for high-frequency modeling, and introduce FreeU to reduce the high-frequency noise for waveform generation. The experimental results demonstrated that our model outperforms the previous models both in Mel-spectrogram reconstruction and text-to-speech tasks. All source code will be available at https://github.com/sh-lee-prml/PeriodWave.

VALL-E R: Robust and Efficient Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis via Monotonic Alignment

With the help of discrete neural audio codecs, large language models (LLM) have increasingly been recognized as a promising methodology for zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis. However, sampling based decoding strategies bring astonishing diversity to generation, but also pose robustness issues such as typos, omissions and repetition. In addition, the high sampling rate of audio also brings huge computational overhead to the inference process of autoregression. To address these issues, we propose VALL-E R, a robust and efficient zero-shot TTS system, building upon the foundation of VALL-E. Specifically, we introduce a phoneme monotonic alignment strategy to strengthen the connection between phonemes and acoustic sequence, ensuring a more precise alignment by constraining the acoustic tokens to match their associated phonemes. Furthermore, we employ a codec-merging approach to downsample the discrete codes in shallow quantization layer, thereby accelerating the decoding speed while preserving the high quality of speech output. Benefiting from these strategies, VALL-E R obtains controllablity over phonemes and demonstrates its strong robustness by approaching the WER of ground truth. In addition, it requires fewer autoregressive steps, with over 60% time reduction during inference. This research has the potential to be applied to meaningful projects, including the creation of speech for those affected by aphasia. Audio samples will be available at: https://aka.ms/valler.

TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?

Recently, there is a surge in interest surrounding video large language models (Video LLMs). However, existing benchmarks fail to provide a comprehensive feedback on the temporal perception ability of Video LLMs. On the one hand, most of them are unable to distinguish between different temporal aspects (e.g., speed, direction) and thus cannot reflect the nuanced performance on these specific aspects. On the other hand, they are limited in the diversity of task formats (e.g., only multi-choice QA), which hinders the understanding of how temporal perception performance may vary across different types of tasks. Motivated by these two problems, we propose the TempCompass benchmark, which introduces a diversity of temporal aspects and task formats. To collect high-quality test data, we devise two novel strategies: (1) In video collection, we construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect, which prevents Video LLMs from leveraging single-frame bias or language priors. (2) To collect the task instructions, we propose a paradigm where humans first annotate meta-information for a video and then an LLM generates the instruction. We also design an LLM-based approach to automatically and accurately evaluate the responses from Video LLMs. Based on TempCompass, we comprehensively evaluate 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) Video LLMs and 3 Image LLMs, and reveal the discerning fact that these models exhibit notably poor temporal perception ability. The data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/llyx97/TempCompass.

Chronologically Accurate Retrieval for Temporal Grounding of Motion-Language Models

With the release of large-scale motion datasets with textual annotations, the task of establishing a robust latent space for language and 3D human motion has recently witnessed a surge of interest. Methods have been proposed to convert human motion and texts into features to achieve accurate correspondence between them. Despite these efforts to align language and motion representations, we claim that the temporal element is often overlooked, especially for compound actions, resulting in chronological inaccuracies. To shed light on the temporal alignment in motion-language latent spaces, we propose Chronologically Accurate Retrieval (CAR) to evaluate the chronological understanding of the models. We decompose textual descriptions into events, and prepare negative text samples by shuffling the order of events in compound action descriptions. We then design a simple task for motion-language models to retrieve the more likely text from the ground truth and its chronologically shuffled version. CAR reveals many cases where current motion-language models fail to distinguish the event chronology of human motion, despite their impressive performance in terms of conventional evaluation metrics. To achieve better temporal alignment between text and motion, we further propose to use these texts with shuffled sequence of events as negative samples during training to reinforce the motion-language models. We conduct experiments on text-motion retrieval and text-to-motion generation using the reinforced motion-language models, which demonstrate improved performance over conventional approaches, indicating the necessity to consider temporal elements in motion-language alignment.

MotionAura: Generating High-Quality and Motion Consistent Videos using Discrete Diffusion

The spatio-temporal complexity of video data presents significant challenges in tasks such as compression, generation, and inpainting. We present four key contributions to address the challenges of spatiotemporal video processing. First, we introduce the 3D Mobile Inverted Vector-Quantization Variational Autoencoder (3D-MBQ-VAE), which combines Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with masked token modeling to enhance spatiotemporal video compression. The model achieves superior temporal consistency and state-of-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction quality by employing a novel training strategy with full frame masking. Second, we present MotionAura, a text-to-video generation framework that utilizes vector-quantized diffusion models to discretize the latent space and capture complex motion dynamics, producing temporally coherent videos aligned with text prompts. Third, we propose a spectral transformer-based denoising network that processes video data in the frequency domain using the Fourier Transform. This method effectively captures global context and long-range dependencies for high-quality video generation and denoising. Lastly, we introduce a downstream task of Sketch Guided Video Inpainting. This task leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our models achieve SOTA performance on a range of benchmarks. Our work offers robust frameworks for spatiotemporal modeling and user-driven video content manipulation. We will release the code, datasets, and models in open-source.

NERV++: An Enhanced Implicit Neural Video Representation

Neural fields, also known as implicit neural representations (INRs), have shown a remarkable capability of representing, generating, and manipulating various data types, allowing for continuous data reconstruction at a low memory footprint. Though promising, INRs applied to video compression still need to improve their rate-distortion performance by a large margin, and require a huge number of parameters and long training iterations to capture high-frequency details, limiting their wider applicability. Resolving this problem remains a quite challenging task, which would make INRs more accessible in compression tasks. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by introducing neural representations for videos NeRV++, an enhanced implicit neural video representation, as more straightforward yet effective enhancement over the original NeRV decoder architecture, featuring separable conv2d residual blocks (SCRBs) that sandwiches the upsampling block (UB), and a bilinear interpolation skip layer for improved feature representation. NeRV++ allows videos to be directly represented as a function approximated by a neural network, and significantly enhance the representation capacity beyond current INR-based video codecs. We evaluate our method on UVG, MCL JVC, and Bunny datasets, achieving competitive results for video compression with INRs. This achievement narrows the gap to autoencoder-based video coding, marking a significant stride in INR-based video compression research.

CoLLAP: Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining with Musical Temporal Structure Augmentation

Modeling temporal characteristics plays a significant role in the representation learning of audio waveform. We propose Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining (CoLLAP) to significantly extend the perception window for both the input audio (up to 5 minutes) and the language descriptions (exceeding 250 words), while enabling contrastive learning across modalities and temporal dynamics. Leveraging recent Music-LLMs to generate long-form music captions for full-length songs, augmented with musical temporal structures, we collect 51.3K audio-text pairs derived from the large-scale AudioSet training dataset, where the average audio length reaches 288 seconds. We propose a novel contrastive learning architecture that fuses language representations with structured audio representations by segmenting each song into clips and extracting their embeddings. With an attention mechanism, we capture multimodal temporal correlations, allowing the model to automatically weigh and enhance the final fusion score for improved contrastive alignment. Finally, we develop two variants of the CoLLAP model with different types of backbone language models. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple long-form music-text retrieval datasets, we demonstrate consistent performance improvement in retrieval accuracy compared with baselines. We also show the pretrained CoLLAP models can be transferred to various music information retrieval tasks, with heterogeneous long-form multimodal contexts.

Enhancing Audio-Language Models through Self-Supervised Post-Training with Text-Audio Pairs

Research on multi-modal contrastive learning strategies for audio and text has rapidly gained interest. Contrastively trained Audio-Language Models (ALMs), such as CLAP, which establish a unified representation across audio and language modalities, have enhanced the efficacy in various subsequent tasks by providing good text aligned audio encoders and vice versa. These improvements are evident in areas like zero-shot audio classification and audio retrieval, among others. However, the ability of these models to understand natural language and temporal relations is still a largely unexplored and open field for research. In this paper, we propose to equip the multi-modal ALMs with temporal understanding without loosing their inherent prior capabilities of audio-language tasks with a temporal instillation method TeminAL. We implement a two-stage training scheme TeminAL A & B, where the model first learns to differentiate between multiple sounds in TeminAL A, followed by a phase that instills a sense of time, thereby enhancing its temporal understanding in TeminAL B. This approach results in an average performance gain of 5.28% in temporal understanding on the ESC-50 dataset, while the model remains competitive in zero-shot retrieval and classification tasks on the AudioCap/Clotho datasets. We also note the lack of proper evaluation techniques for contrastive ALMs and propose a strategy for evaluating ALMs in zero-shot settings. The general-purpose zero-shot model evaluation strategy ZSTE, is used to evaluate various prior models. ZSTE demonstrates a general strategy to evaluate all ZS contrastive models. The model trained with TeminAL successfully outperforms current models on most downstream tasks.

Diverse and Aligned Audio-to-Video Generation via Text-to-Video Model Adaptation

We consider the task of generating diverse and realistic videos guided by natural audio samples from a wide variety of semantic classes. For this task, the videos are required to be aligned both globally and temporally with the input audio: globally, the input audio is semantically associated with the entire output video, and temporally, each segment of the input audio is associated with a corresponding segment of that video. We utilize an existing text-conditioned video generation model and a pre-trained audio encoder model. The proposed method is based on a lightweight adaptor network, which learns to map the audio-based representation to the input representation expected by the text-to-video generation model. As such, it also enables video generation conditioned on text, audio, and, for the first time as far as we can ascertain, on both text and audio. We validate our method extensively on three datasets demonstrating significant semantic diversity of audio-video samples and further propose a novel evaluation metric (AV-Align) to assess the alignment of generated videos with input audio samples. AV-Align is based on the detection and comparison of energy peaks in both modalities. In comparison to recent state-of-the-art approaches, our method generates videos that are better aligned with the input sound, both with respect to content and temporal axis. We also show that videos produced by our method present higher visual quality and are more diverse.

Learning Trajectory-Aware Transformer for Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to restore a sequence of high-resolution (HR) frames from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Although some progress has been made, there are grand challenges to effectively utilize temporal dependency in entire video sequences. Existing approaches usually align and aggregate video frames from limited adjacent frames (e.g., 5 or 7 frames), which prevents these approaches from satisfactory results. In this paper, we take one step further to enable effective spatio-temporal learning in videos. We propose a novel Trajectory-aware Transformer for Video Super-Resolution (TTVSR). In particular, we formulate video frames into several pre-aligned trajectories which consist of continuous visual tokens. For a query token, self-attention is only learned on relevant visual tokens along spatio-temporal trajectories. Compared with vanilla vision Transformers, such a design significantly reduces the computational cost and enables Transformers to model long-range features. We further propose a cross-scale feature tokenization module to overcome scale-changing problems that often occur in long-range videos. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TTVSR over state-of-the-art models, by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations in four widely-used video super-resolution benchmarks. Both code and pre-trained models can be downloaded at https://github.com/researchmm/TTVSR.

PVC: Progressive Visual Token Compression for Unified Image and Video Processing in Large Vision-Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been extended to understand both images and videos. Visual token compression is leveraged to reduce the considerable token length of visual inputs. To meet the needs of different tasks, existing high-performance models usually process images and videos separately with different token compression strategies, limiting the capabilities of combining images and videos. To this end, we extend each image into a "static" video and introduce a unified token compression strategy called Progressive Visual Token Compression (PVC), where the tokens of each frame are progressively encoded and adaptively compressed to supplement the information not extracted from previous frames. Video tokens are efficiently compressed with exploiting the inherent temporal redundancy. Images are repeated as static videos, and the spatial details can be gradually supplemented in multiple frames. PVC unifies the token compressing of images and videos. With a limited number of tokens per frame (64 tokens by default), spatial details and temporal changes can still be preserved. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across various video understanding benchmarks, including long video tasks and fine-grained short video tasks. Meanwhile, our unified token compression strategy incurs no performance loss on image benchmarks, particularly in detail-sensitive tasks.

Implicit Temporal Modeling with Learnable Alignment for Video Recognition

Contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable success in various image tasks. However, how to extend CLIP with effective temporal modeling is still an open and crucial problem. Existing factorized or joint spatial-temporal modeling trades off between the efficiency and performance. While modeling temporal information within straight through tube is widely adopted in literature, we find that simple frame alignment already provides enough essence without temporal attention. To this end, in this paper, we proposed a novel Implicit Learnable Alignment (ILA) method, which minimizes the temporal modeling effort while achieving incredibly high performance. Specifically, for a frame pair, an interactive point is predicted in each frame, serving as a mutual information rich region. By enhancing the features around the interactive point, two frames are implicitly aligned. The aligned features are then pooled into a single token, which is leveraged in the subsequent spatial self-attention. Our method allows eliminating the costly or insufficient temporal self-attention in video. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and generality of our module. Particularly, the proposed ILA achieves a top-1 accuracy of 88.7% on Kinetics-400 with much fewer FLOPs compared with Swin-L and ViViT-H. Code is released at https://github.com/Francis-Rings/ILA .

Event-based Temporally Dense Optical Flow Estimation with Sequential Neural Networks

Prior works on event-based optical flow estimation have investigated several gradient-based learning methods to train neural networks for predicting optical flow. However, they do not utilize the fast data rate of event data streams and rely on a spatio-temporal representation constructed from a collection of events over a fixed period of time (often between two grayscale frames). As a result, optical flow is only evaluated at a frequency much lower than the rate data is produced by an event-based camera, leading to a temporally sparse optical flow estimation. To predict temporally dense optical flow, we cast the problem as a sequential learning task and propose a training methodology to train sequential networks for continuous prediction on an event stream. We propose two types of networks: one focused on performance and another focused on compute efficiency. We first train long-short term memory networks (LSTMs) on the DSEC dataset and demonstrated 10x temporally dense optical flow estimation over existing flow estimation approaches. The additional benefit of having a memory to draw long temporal correlations back in time results in a 19.7% improvement in flow prediction accuracy of LSTMs over similar networks with no memory elements. We subsequently show that the inherent recurrence of spiking neural networks (SNNs) enables them to learn and estimate temporally dense optical flow with 31.8% lesser parameters than LSTM, but with a slightly increased error. This demonstrates potential for energy-efficient implementation of fast optical flow prediction using SNNs.

DDoS-UNet: Incorporating temporal information using Dynamic Dual-channel UNet for enhancing super-resolution of dynamic MRI

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides high spatial resolution and excellent soft-tissue contrast without using harmful ionising radiation. Dynamic MRI is an essential tool for interventions to visualise movements or changes of the target organ. However, such MRI acquisition with high temporal resolution suffers from limited spatial resolution - also known as the spatio-temporal trade-off of dynamic MRI. Several approaches, including deep learning based super-resolution approaches, have been proposed to mitigate this trade-off. Nevertheless, such an approach typically aims to super-resolve each time-point separately, treating them as individual volumes. This research addresses the problem by creating a deep learning model which attempts to learn both spatial and temporal relationships. A modified 3D UNet model, DDoS-UNet, is proposed - which takes the low-resolution volume of the current time-point along with a prior image volume. Initially, the network is supplied with a static high-resolution planning scan as the prior image along with the low-resolution input to super-resolve the first time-point. Then it continues step-wise by using the super-resolved time-points as the prior image while super-resolving the subsequent time-points. The model performance was tested with 3D dynamic data that was undersampled to different in-plane levels. The proposed network achieved an average SSIM value of 0.951pm0.017 while reconstructing the lowest resolution data (i.e. only 4\% of the k-space acquired) - which could result in a theoretical acceleration factor of 25. The proposed approach can be used to reduce the required scan-time while achieving high spatial resolution.

UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation

Recent diffusion-based human image animation techniques have demonstrated impressive success in synthesizing videos that faithfully follow a given reference identity and a sequence of desired movement poses. Despite this, there are still two limitations: i) an extra reference model is required to align the identity image with the main video branch, which significantly increases the optimization burden and model parameters; ii) the generated video is usually short in time (e.g., 24 frames), hampering practical applications. To address these shortcomings, we present a UniAnimate framework to enable efficient and long-term human video generation. First, to reduce the optimization difficulty and ensure temporal coherence, we map the reference image along with the posture guidance and noise video into a common feature space by incorporating a unified video diffusion model. Second, we propose a unified noise input that supports random noised input as well as first frame conditioned input, which enhances the ability to generate long-term video. Finally, to further efficiently handle long sequences, we explore an alternative temporal modeling architecture based on state space model to replace the original computation-consuming temporal Transformer. Extensive experimental results indicate that UniAnimate achieves superior synthesis results over existing state-of-the-art counterparts in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Notably, UniAnimate can even generate highly consistent one-minute videos by iteratively employing the first frame conditioning strategy. Code and models will be publicly available. Project page: https://unianimate.github.io/.

LMM-VQA: Advancing Video Quality Assessment with Large Multimodal Models

The explosive growth of videos on streaming media platforms has underscored the urgent need for effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms to monitor and perceptually optimize the quality of streaming videos. However, VQA remains an extremely challenging task due to the diverse video content and the complex spatial and temporal distortions, thus necessitating more advanced methods to address these issues. Nowadays, large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V, have exhibited strong capabilities for various visual understanding tasks, motivating us to leverage the powerful multimodal representation ability of LMMs to solve the VQA task. Therefore, we propose the first Large Multi-Modal Video Quality Assessment (LMM-VQA) model, which introduces a novel spatiotemporal visual modeling strategy for quality-aware feature extraction. Specifically, we first reformulate the quality regression problem into a question and answering (Q&A) task and construct Q&A prompts for VQA instruction tuning. Then, we design a spatiotemporal vision encoder to extract spatial and temporal features to represent the quality characteristics of videos, which are subsequently mapped into the language space by the spatiotemporal projector for modality alignment. Finally, the aligned visual tokens and the quality-inquired text tokens are aggregated as inputs for the large language model (LLM) to generate the quality score and level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LMM-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance across five VQA benchmarks, exhibiting an average improvement of 5% in generalization ability over existing methods. Furthermore, due to the advanced design of the spatiotemporal encoder and projector, LMM-VQA also performs exceptionally well on general video understanding tasks, further validating its effectiveness. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Sueqk/LMM-VQA.

Effectively Modeling Time Series with Simple Discrete State Spaces

Time series modeling is a well-established problem, which often requires that methods (1) expressively represent complicated dependencies, (2) forecast long horizons, and (3) efficiently train over long sequences. State-space models (SSMs) are classical models for time series, and prior works combine SSMs with deep learning layers for efficient sequence modeling. However, we find fundamental limitations with these prior approaches, proving their SSM representations cannot express autoregressive time series processes. We thus introduce SpaceTime, a new state-space time series architecture that improves all three criteria. For expressivity, we propose a new SSM parameterization based on the companion matrix -- a canonical representation for discrete-time processes -- which enables SpaceTime's SSM layers to learn desirable autoregressive processes. For long horizon forecasting, we introduce a "closed-loop" variation of the companion SSM, which enables SpaceTime to predict many future time-steps by generating its own layer-wise inputs. For efficient training and inference, we introduce an algorithm that reduces the memory and compute of a forward pass with the companion matrix. With sequence length ell and state-space size d, we go from O(d ell) na\"ively to O(d + ell). In experiments, our contributions lead to state-of-the-art results on extensive and diverse benchmarks, with best or second-best AUROC on 6 / 7 ECG and speech time series classification, and best MSE on 14 / 16 Informer forecasting tasks. Furthermore, we find SpaceTime (1) fits AR(p) processes that prior deep SSMs fail on, (2) forecasts notably more accurately on longer horizons than prior state-of-the-art, and (3) speeds up training on real-world ETTh1 data by 73% and 80% relative wall-clock time over Transformers and LSTMs.

RIGID: Recurrent GAN Inversion and Editing of Real Face Videos

GAN inversion is indispensable for applying the powerful editability of GAN to real images. However, existing methods invert video frames individually often leading to undesired inconsistent results over time. In this paper, we propose a unified recurrent framework, named Recurrent vIdeo GAN Inversion and eDiting (RIGID), to explicitly and simultaneously enforce temporally coherent GAN inversion and facial editing of real videos. Our approach models the temporal relations between current and previous frames from three aspects. To enable a faithful real video reconstruction, we first maximize the inversion fidelity and consistency by learning a temporal compensated latent code. Second, we observe incoherent noises lie in the high-frequency domain that can be disentangled from the latent space. Third, to remove the inconsistency after attribute manipulation, we propose an in-between frame composition constraint such that the arbitrary frame must be a direct composite of its neighboring frames. Our unified framework learns the inherent coherence between input frames in an end-to-end manner, and therefore it is agnostic to a specific attribute and can be applied to arbitrary editing of the same video without re-training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIGID outperforms state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively in both inversion and editing tasks. The deliverables can be found in https://cnnlstm.github.io/RIGID

AR-Diffusion: Asynchronous Video Generation with Auto-Regressive Diffusion

The task of video generation requires synthesizing visually realistic and temporally coherent video frames. Existing methods primarily use asynchronous auto-regressive models or synchronous diffusion models to address this challenge. However, asynchronous auto-regressive models often suffer from inconsistencies between training and inference, leading to issues such as error accumulation, while synchronous diffusion models are limited by their reliance on rigid sequence length. To address these issues, we introduce Auto-Regressive Diffusion (AR-Diffusion), a novel model that combines the strengths of auto-regressive and diffusion models for flexible, asynchronous video generation. Specifically, our approach leverages diffusion to gradually corrupt video frames in both training and inference, reducing the discrepancy between these phases. Inspired by auto-regressive generation, we incorporate a non-decreasing constraint on the corruption timesteps of individual frames, ensuring that earlier frames remain clearer than subsequent ones. This setup, together with temporal causal attention, enables flexible generation of videos with varying lengths while preserving temporal coherence. In addition, we design two specialized timestep schedulers: the FoPP scheduler for balanced timestep sampling during training, and the AD scheduler for flexible timestep differences during inference, supporting both synchronous and asynchronous generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, which achieves competitive and state-of-the-art results across four challenging benchmarks.

Let the Code LLM Edit Itself When You Edit the Code

In this work, we investigate a typical scenario in code generation where a developer edits existing code in real time and requests a code assistant, e.g., a large language model, to re-predict the next token or next line on the fly. Naively, the LLM needs to re-encode the entire KV cache to provide an accurate prediction. However, this process is computationally expensive, especially when the sequence length is long. Simply encoding the edited subsequence and integrating it to the original KV cache meets the temporal confusion problem, leading to significantly worse performance. We address this efficiency and accuracy trade-off by introducing \textbf{Positional \textbf{Integrity Encoding} (PIE). Building upon the rotary positional encoding, PIE first removes the rotary matrices in the Key cache that introduce temporal confusion and then reapplies the correct rotary matrices. This process ensures that positional relationships between tokens are correct and requires only a single round of matrix multiplication. We validate the effectiveness of PIE through extensive experiments on the RepoBench-C-8k dataset, utilizing DeepSeek-Coder models with 1.3B, 6.7B, and 33B parameters. Our evaluation includes three real-world coding tasks: code insertion, code deletion, and multi-place code editing. Results demonstrate that PIE reduces computational overhead by over 85% compared to the standard full recomputation approach across all model sizes and tasks while well approximating the model performance.

WavTokenizer: an Efficient Acoustic Discrete Codec Tokenizer for Audio Language Modeling

Language models have been effectively applied to modeling natural signals, such as images, video, speech, and audio. A crucial component of these models is the codec tokenizer, which compresses high-dimensional natural signals into lower-dimensional discrete tokens. In this paper, we introduce WavTokenizer, which offers several advantages over previous SOTA acoustic codec models in the audio domain: 1)extreme compression. By compressing the layers of quantizers and the temporal dimension of the discrete codec, one-second audio of 24kHz sampling rate requires only a single quantizer with 40 or 75 tokens. 2)improved subjective quality. Despite the reduced number of tokens, WavTokenizer achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality with outstanding UTMOS scores and inherently contains richer semantic information. Specifically, we achieve these results by designing a broader VQ space, extended contextual windows, and improved attention networks, as well as introducing a powerful multi-scale discriminator and an inverse Fourier transform structure. We conducted extensive reconstruction experiments in the domains of speech, audio, and music. WavTokenizer exhibited strong performance across various objective and subjective metrics compared to state-of-the-art models. We also tested semantic information, VQ utilization, and adaptability to generative models. Comprehensive ablation studies confirm the necessity of each module in WavTokenizer. The related code, demos, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jishengpeng/WavTokenizer.

Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation

Single-channel, speaker-independent speech separation methods have recently seen great progress. However, the accuracy, latency, and computational cost of such methods remain insufficient. The majority of the previous methods have formulated the separation problem through the time-frequency representation of the mixed signal, which has several drawbacks, including the decoupling of the phase and magnitude of the signal, the suboptimality of time-frequency representation for speech separation, and the long latency in calculating the spectrograms. To address these shortcomings, we propose a fully-convolutional time-domain audio separation network (Conv-TasNet), a deep learning framework for end-to-end time-domain speech separation. Conv-TasNet uses a linear encoder to generate a representation of the speech waveform optimized for separating individual speakers. Speaker separation is achieved by applying a set of weighting functions (masks) to the encoder output. The modified encoder representations are then inverted back to the waveforms using a linear decoder. The masks are found using a temporal convolutional network (TCN) consisting of stacked 1-D dilated convolutional blocks, which allows the network to model the long-term dependencies of the speech signal while maintaining a small model size. The proposed Conv-TasNet system significantly outperforms previous time-frequency masking methods in separating two- and three-speaker mixtures. Additionally, Conv-TasNet surpasses several ideal time-frequency magnitude masks in two-speaker speech separation as evaluated by both objective distortion measures and subjective quality assessment by human listeners. Finally, Conv-TasNet has a significantly smaller model size and a shorter minimum latency, making it a suitable solution for both offline and real-time speech separation applications.

CMTA: Cross-Modal Temporal Alignment for Event-guided Video Deblurring

Video deblurring aims to enhance the quality of restored results in motion-blurred videos by effectively gathering information from adjacent video frames to compensate for the insufficient data in a single blurred frame. However, when faced with consecutively severe motion blur situations, frame-based video deblurring methods often fail to find accurate temporal correspondence among neighboring video frames, leading to diminished performance. To address this limitation, we aim to solve the video deblurring task by leveraging an event camera with micro-second temporal resolution. To fully exploit the dense temporal resolution of the event camera, we propose two modules: 1) Intra-frame feature enhancement operates within the exposure time of a single blurred frame, iteratively enhancing cross-modality features in a recurrent manner to better utilize the rich temporal information of events, 2) Inter-frame temporal feature alignment gathers valuable long-range temporal information to target frames, aggregating sharp features leveraging the advantages of the events. In addition, we present a novel dataset composed of real-world blurred RGB videos, corresponding sharp videos, and event data. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for evaluating event-guided deblurring methods. We demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art frame-based and event-based motion deblurring methods through extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world deblurring datasets. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/intelpro/CMTA.

VCISR: Blind Single Image Super-Resolution with Video Compression Synthetic Data

In the blind single image super-resolution (SISR) task, existing works have been successful in restoring image-level unknown degradations. However, when a single video frame becomes the input, these works usually fail to address degradations caused by video compression, such as mosquito noise, ringing, blockiness, and staircase noise. In this work, we for the first time, present a video compression-based degradation model to synthesize low-resolution image data in the blind SISR task. Our proposed image synthesizing method is widely applicable to existing image datasets, so that a single degraded image can contain distortions caused by the lossy video compression algorithms. This overcomes the leak of feature diversity in video data and thus retains the training efficiency. By introducing video coding artifacts to SISR degradation models, neural networks can super-resolve images with the ability to restore video compression degradations, and achieve better results on restoring generic distortions caused by image compression as well. Our proposed approach achieves superior performance in SOTA no-reference Image Quality Assessment, and shows better visual quality on various datasets. In addition, we evaluate the SISR neural network trained with our degradation model on video super-resolution (VSR) datasets. Compared to architectures specifically designed for the VSR purpose, our method exhibits similar or better performance, evidencing that the presented strategy on infusing video-based degradation is generalizable to address more complicated compression artifacts even without temporal cues.

Extreme Image Compression using Fine-tuned VQGANs

Recent advances in generative compression methods have demonstrated remarkable progress in enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed data, especially in scenarios with low bitrates. However, their efficacy and applicability to achieve extreme compression ratios (<0.05 bpp) remain constrained. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective coding framework by introducing vector quantization (VQ)--based generative models into the image compression domain. The main insight is that the codebook learned by the VQGAN model yields a strong expressive capacity, facilitating efficient compression of continuous information in the latent space while maintaining reconstruction quality. Specifically, an image can be represented as VQ-indices by finding the nearest codeword, which can be encoded using lossless compression methods into bitstreams. We propose clustering a pre-trained large-scale codebook into smaller codebooks through the K-means algorithm, yielding variable bitrates and different levels of reconstruction quality within the coding framework. Furthermore, we introduce a transformer to predict lost indices and restore images in unstable environments. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art codecs in terms of perceptual quality-oriented metrics and human perception at extremely low bitrates (le 0.04 bpp). Remarkably, even with the loss of up to 20% of indices, the images can be effectively restored with minimal perceptual loss.

TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis is of immense importance in extensive applications, such as weather forecasting, anomaly detection, and action recognition. This paper focuses on temporal variation modeling, which is the common key problem of extensive analysis tasks. Previous methods attempt to accomplish this directly from the 1D time series, which is extremely challenging due to the intricate temporal patterns. Based on the observation of multi-periodicity in time series, we ravel out the complex temporal variations into the multiple intraperiod- and interperiod-variations. To tackle the limitations of 1D time series in representation capability, we extend the analysis of temporal variations into the 2D space by transforming the 1D time series into a set of 2D tensors based on multiple periods. This transformation can embed the intraperiod- and interperiod-variations into the columns and rows of the 2D tensors respectively, making the 2D-variations to be easily modeled by 2D kernels. Technically, we propose the TimesNet with TimesBlock as a task-general backbone for time series analysis. TimesBlock can discover the multi-periodicity adaptively and extract the complex temporal variations from transformed 2D tensors by a parameter-efficient inception block. Our proposed TimesNet achieves consistent state-of-the-art in five mainstream time series analysis tasks, including short- and long-term forecasting, imputation, classification, and anomaly detection. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/TimesNet.

TrackSSM: A General Motion Predictor by State-Space Model

Temporal motion modeling has always been a key component in multiple object tracking (MOT) which can ensure smooth trajectory movement and provide accurate positional information to enhance association precision. However, current motion models struggle to be both efficient and effective across different application scenarios. To this end, we propose TrackSSM inspired by the recently popular state space models (SSM), a unified encoder-decoder motion framework that uses data-dependent state space model to perform temporal motion of trajectories. Specifically, we propose Flow-SSM, a module that utilizes the position and motion information from historical trajectories to guide the temporal state transition of object bounding boxes. Based on Flow-SSM, we design a flow decoder. It is composed of a cascaded motion decoding module employing Flow-SSM, which can use the encoded flow information to complete the temporal position prediction of trajectories. Additionally, we propose a Step-by-Step Linear (S^2L) training strategy. By performing linear interpolation between the positions of the object in the previous frame and the current frame, we construct the pseudo labels of step-by-step linear training, ensuring that the trajectory flow information can better guide the object bounding box in completing temporal transitions. TrackSSM utilizes a simple Mamba-Block to build a motion encoder for historical trajectories, forming a temporal motion model with an encoder-decoder structure in conjunction with the flow decoder. TrackSSM is applicable to various tracking scenarios and achieves excellent tracking performance across multiple benchmarks, further extending the potential of SSM-like temporal motion models in multi-object tracking tasks. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Xavier-Lin/TrackSSM.

Mixed Neural Voxels for Fast Multi-view Video Synthesis

Synthesizing high-fidelity videos from real-world multi-view input is challenging because of the complexities of real-world environments and highly dynamic motions. Previous works based on neural radiance fields have demonstrated high-quality reconstructions of dynamic scenes. However, training such models on real-world scenes is time-consuming, usually taking days or weeks. In this paper, we present a novel method named MixVoxels to better represent the dynamic scenes with fast training speed and competitive rendering qualities. The proposed MixVoxels represents the 4D dynamic scenes as a mixture of static and dynamic voxels and processes them with different networks. In this way, the computation of the required modalities for static voxels can be processed by a lightweight model, which essentially reduces the amount of computation, especially for many daily dynamic scenes dominated by the static background. To separate the two kinds of voxels, we propose a novel variation field to estimate the temporal variance of each voxel. For the dynamic voxels, we design an inner-product time query method to efficiently query multiple time steps, which is essential to recover the high-dynamic motions. As a result, with 15 minutes of training for dynamic scenes with inputs of 300-frame videos, MixVoxels achieves better PSNR than previous methods. Codes and trained models are available at https://github.com/fengres/mixvoxels

Sonic: Shifting Focus to Global Audio Perception in Portrait Animation

The study of talking face generation mainly explores the intricacies of synchronizing facial movements and crafting visually appealing, temporally-coherent animations. However, due to the limited exploration of global audio perception, current approaches predominantly employ auxiliary visual and spatial knowledge to stabilize the movements, which often results in the deterioration of the naturalness and temporal inconsistencies.Considering the essence of audio-driven animation, the audio signal serves as the ideal and unique priors to adjust facial expressions and lip movements, without resorting to interference of any visual signals. Based on this motivation, we propose a novel paradigm, dubbed as Sonic, to {s}hift f{o}cus on the exploration of global audio per{c}ept{i}o{n}.To effectively leverage global audio knowledge, we disentangle it into intra- and inter-clip audio perception and collaborate with both aspects to enhance overall perception.For the intra-clip audio perception, 1). Context-enhanced audio learning, in which long-range intra-clip temporal audio knowledge is extracted to provide facial expression and lip motion priors implicitly expressed as the tone and speed of speech. 2). Motion-decoupled controller, in which the motion of the head and expression movement are disentangled and independently controlled by intra-audio clips. Most importantly, for inter-clip audio perception, as a bridge to connect the intra-clips to achieve the global perception, Time-aware position shift fusion, in which the global inter-clip audio information is considered and fused for long-audio inference via through consecutively time-aware shifted windows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the novel audio-driven paradigm outperform existing SOTA methodologies in terms of video quality, temporally consistency, lip synchronization precision, and motion diversity.

FancyVideo: Towards Dynamic and Consistent Video Generation via Cross-frame Textual Guidance

Synthesizing motion-rich and temporally consistent videos remains a challenge in artificial intelligence, especially when dealing with extended durations. Existing text-to-video (T2V) models commonly employ spatial cross-attention for text control, equivalently guiding different frame generations without frame-specific textual guidance. Thus, the model's capacity to comprehend the temporal logic conveyed in prompts and generate videos with coherent motion is restricted. To tackle this limitation, we introduce FancyVideo, an innovative video generator that improves the existing text-control mechanism with the well-designed Cross-frame Textual Guidance Module (CTGM). Specifically, CTGM incorporates the Temporal Information Injector (TII), Temporal Affinity Refiner (TAR), and Temporal Feature Booster (TFB) at the beginning, middle, and end of cross-attention, respectively, to achieve frame-specific textual guidance. Firstly, TII injects frame-specific information from latent features into text conditions, thereby obtaining cross-frame textual conditions. Then, TAR refines the correlation matrix between cross-frame textual conditions and latent features along the time dimension. Lastly, TFB boosts the temporal consistency of latent features. Extensive experiments comprising both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of FancyVideo. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art T2V generation results on the EvalCrafter benchmark and facilitates the synthesis of dynamic and consistent videos. The video show results can be available at https://fancyvideo.github.io/, and we will make our code and model weights publicly available.

CATR: Combinatorial-Dependence Audio-Queried Transformer for Audio-Visual Video Segmentation

Audio-visual video segmentation~(AVVS) aims to generate pixel-level maps of sound-producing objects within image frames and ensure the maps faithfully adhere to the given audio, such as identifying and segmenting a singing person in a video. However, existing methods exhibit two limitations: 1) they address video temporal features and audio-visual interactive features separately, disregarding the inherent spatial-temporal dependence of combined audio and video, and 2) they inadequately introduce audio constraints and object-level information during the decoding stage, resulting in segmentation outcomes that fail to comply with audio directives. To tackle these issues, we propose a decoupled audio-video transformer that combines audio and video features from their respective temporal and spatial dimensions, capturing their combined dependence. To optimize memory consumption, we design a block, which, when stacked, enables capturing audio-visual fine-grained combinatorial-dependence in a memory-efficient manner. Additionally, we introduce audio-constrained queries during the decoding phase. These queries contain rich object-level information, ensuring the decoded mask adheres to the sounds. Experimental results confirm our approach's effectiveness, with our framework achieving a new SOTA performance on all three datasets using two backbones. The code is available at https://github.com/aspirinone/CATR.github.io

FoleyCrafter: Bring Silent Videos to Life with Lifelike and Synchronized Sounds

We study Neural Foley, the automatic generation of high-quality sound effects synchronizing with videos, enabling an immersive audio-visual experience. Despite its wide range of applications, existing approaches encounter limitations when it comes to simultaneously synthesizing high-quality and video-aligned (i.e.,, semantic relevant and temporal synchronized) sounds. To overcome these limitations, we propose FoleyCrafter, a novel framework that leverages a pre-trained text-to-audio model to ensure high-quality audio generation. FoleyCrafter comprises two key components: the semantic adapter for semantic alignment and the temporal controller for precise audio-video synchronization. The semantic adapter utilizes parallel cross-attention layers to condition audio generation on video features, producing realistic sound effects that are semantically relevant to the visual content. Meanwhile, the temporal controller incorporates an onset detector and a timestampbased adapter to achieve precise audio-video alignment. One notable advantage of FoleyCrafter is its compatibility with text prompts, enabling the use of text descriptions to achieve controllable and diverse video-to-audio generation according to user intents. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on standard benchmarks to verify the effectiveness of FoleyCrafter. Models and codes are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/FoleyCrafter.

Step-Video-T2V Technical Report: The Practice, Challenges, and Future of Video Foundation Model

We present Step-Video-T2V, a state-of-the-art text-to-video pre-trained model with 30B parameters and the ability to generate videos up to 204 frames in length. A deep compression Variational Autoencoder, Video-VAE, is designed for video generation tasks, achieving 16x16 spatial and 8x temporal compression ratios, while maintaining exceptional video reconstruction quality. User prompts are encoded using two bilingual text encoders to handle both English and Chinese. A DiT with 3D full attention is trained using Flow Matching and is employed to denoise input noise into latent frames. A video-based DPO approach, Video-DPO, is applied to reduce artifacts and improve the visual quality of the generated videos. We also detail our training strategies and share key observations and insights. Step-Video-T2V's performance is evaluated on a novel video generation benchmark, Step-Video-T2V-Eval, demonstrating its state-of-the-art text-to-video quality when compared with both open-source and commercial engines. Additionally, we discuss the limitations of current diffusion-based model paradigm and outline future directions for video foundation models. We make both Step-Video-T2V and Step-Video-T2V-Eval available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Video-T2V. The online version can be accessed from https://yuewen.cn/videos as well. Our goal is to accelerate the innovation of video foundation models and empower video content creators.

Killing two birds with one stone: Can an audio captioning system also be used for audio-text retrieval?

Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) aims to develop systems capable of describing an audio recording using a textual sentence. In contrast, Audio-Text Retrieval (ATR) systems seek to find the best matching audio recording(s) for a given textual query (Text-to-Audio) or vice versa (Audio-to-Text). These tasks require different types of systems: AAC employs a sequence-to-sequence model, while ATR utilizes a ranking model that compares audio and text representations within a shared projection subspace. However, this work investigates the relationship between AAC and ATR by exploring the ATR capabilities of an unmodified AAC system, without fine-tuning for the new task. Our AAC system consists of an audio encoder (ConvNeXt-Tiny) trained on AudioSet for audio tagging, and a transformer decoder responsible for generating sentences. For AAC, it achieves a high SPIDEr-FL score of 0.298 on Clotho and 0.472 on AudioCaps on average. For ATR, we propose using the standard Cross-Entropy loss values obtained for any audio/caption pair. Experimental results on the Clotho and AudioCaps datasets demonstrate decent recall values using this simple approach. For instance, we obtained a Text-to-Audio R@1 value of 0.382 for Au-dioCaps, which is above the current state-of-the-art method without external data. Interestingly, we observe that normalizing the loss values was necessary for Audio-to-Text retrieval.

Moirai-MoE: Empowering Time Series Foundation Models with Sparse Mixture of Experts

Time series foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance as zero-shot forecasters. However, achieving effectively unified training on time series remains an open challenge. Existing approaches introduce some level of model specialization to account for the highly heterogeneous nature of time series data. For instance, Moirai pursues unified training by employing multiple input/output projection layers, each tailored to handle time series at a specific frequency. Similarly, TimesFM maintains a frequency embedding dictionary for this purpose. We identify two major drawbacks to this human-imposed frequency-level model specialization: (1) Frequency is not a reliable indicator of the underlying patterns in time series. For example, time series with different frequencies can display similar patterns, while those with the same frequency may exhibit varied patterns. (2) Non-stationarity is an inherent property of real-world time series, leading to varied distributions even within a short context window of a single time series. Frequency-level specialization is too coarse-grained to capture this level of diversity. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Moirai-MoE, using a single input/output projection layer while delegating the modeling of diverse time series patterns to the sparse mixture of experts (MoE) within Transformers. With these designs, Moirai-MoE reduces reliance on human-defined heuristics and enables automatic token-level specialization. Extensive experiments on 39 datasets demonstrate the superiority of Moirai-MoE over existing foundation models in both in-distribution and zero-shot scenarios. Furthermore, this study conducts comprehensive model analyses to explore the inner workings of time series MoE foundation models and provides valuable insights for future research.

Brain decoding: toward real-time reconstruction of visual perception

In the past five years, the use of generative and foundational AI systems has greatly improved the decoding of brain activity. Visual perception, in particular, can now be decoded from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with remarkable fidelity. This neuroimaging technique, however, suffers from a limited temporal resolution (approx0.5 Hz) and thus fundamentally constrains its real-time usage. Here, we propose an alternative approach based on magnetoencephalography (MEG), a neuroimaging device capable of measuring brain activity with high temporal resolution (approx5,000 Hz). For this, we develop an MEG decoding model trained with both contrastive and regression objectives and consisting of three modules: i) pretrained embeddings obtained from the image, ii) an MEG module trained end-to-end and iii) a pretrained image generator. Our results are threefold: Firstly, our MEG decoder shows a 7X improvement of image-retrieval over classic linear decoders. Second, late brain responses to images are best decoded with DINOv2, a recent foundational image model. Third, image retrievals and generations both suggest that high-level visual features can be decoded from MEG signals, although the same approach applied to 7T fMRI also recovers better low-level features. Overall, these results, while preliminary, provide an important step towards the decoding -- in real-time -- of the visual processes continuously unfolding within the human brain.

Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysis

Time series data are ubiquitous across a wide range of real-world domains. While real-world time series analysis (TSA) requires human experts to integrate numerical series data with multimodal domain-specific knowledge, most existing TSA models rely solely on numerical data, overlooking the significance of information beyond numerical series. This oversight is due to the untapped potential of textual series data and the absence of a comprehensive, high-quality multimodal dataset. To overcome this obstacle, we introduce Time-MMD, the first multi-domain, multimodal time series dataset covering 9 primary data domains. Time-MMD ensures fine-grained modality alignment, eliminates data contamination, and provides high usability. Additionally, we develop MM-TSFlib, the first multimodal time-series forecasting (TSF) library, seamlessly pipelining multimodal TSF evaluations based on Time-MMD for in-depth analyses. Extensive experiments conducted on Time-MMD through MM-TSFlib demonstrate significant performance enhancements by extending unimodal TSF to multimodality, evidenced by over 15% mean squared error reduction in general, and up to 40% in domains with rich textual data. More importantly, our datasets and library revolutionize broader applications, impacts, research topics to advance TSA. The dataset and library are available at https://github.com/AdityaLab/Time-MMD and https://github.com/AdityaLab/MM-TSFlib.

Temporal Residual Guided Diffusion Framework for Event-Driven Video Reconstruction

Event-based video reconstruction has garnered increasing attention due to its advantages, such as high dynamic range and rapid motion capture capabilities. However, current methods often prioritize the extraction of temporal information from continuous event flow, leading to an overemphasis on low-frequency texture features in the scene, resulting in over-smoothing and blurry artifacts. Addressing this challenge necessitates the integration of conditional information, encompassing temporal features, low-frequency texture, and high-frequency events, to guide the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) in producing accurate and natural outputs. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel approach, the Temporal Residual Guided Diffusion Framework, which effectively leverages both temporal and frequency-based event priors. Our framework incorporates three key conditioning modules: a pre-trained low-frequency intensity estimation module, a temporal recurrent encoder module, and an attention-based high-frequency prior enhancement module. In order to capture temporal scene variations from the events at the current moment, we employ a temporal-domain residual image as the target for the diffusion model. Through the combination of these three conditioning paths and the temporal residual framework, our framework excels in reconstructing high-quality videos from event flow, mitigating issues such as artifacts and over-smoothing commonly observed in previous approaches. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets validate the superior performance of our framework compared to prior event-based reconstruction methods.

Spatiotemporal Entropy Model is All You Need for Learned Video Compression

The framework of dominant learned video compression methods is usually composed of motion prediction modules as well as motion vector and residual image compression modules, suffering from its complex structure and error propagation problem. Approaches have been proposed to reduce the complexity by replacing motion prediction modules with implicit flow networks. Error propagation aware training strategy is also proposed to alleviate incremental reconstruction errors from previously decoded frames. Although these methods have brought some improvement, little attention has been paid to the framework itself. Inspired by the success of learned image compression through simplifying the framework with a single deep neural network, it is natural to expect a better performance in video compression via a simple yet appropriate framework. Therefore, we propose a framework to directly compress raw-pixel frames (rather than residual images), where no extra motion prediction module is required. Instead, an entropy model is used to estimate the spatiotemporal redundancy in a latent space rather than pixel level, which significantly reduces the complexity of the framework. Specifically, the whole framework is a compression module, consisting of a unified auto-encoder which produces identically distributed latents for all frames, and a spatiotemporal entropy estimation model to minimize the entropy of these latents. Experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under the metric of multiscale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) and achieves competitive results under the metric of PSNR.

TMA: Temporal Motion Aggregation for Event-based Optical Flow

Event cameras have the ability to record continuous and detailed trajectories of objects with high temporal resolution, thereby providing intuitive motion cues for optical flow estimation. Nevertheless, most existing learning-based approaches for event optical flow estimation directly remould the paradigm of conventional images by representing the consecutive event stream as static frames, ignoring the inherent temporal continuity of event data. In this paper, we argue that temporal continuity is a vital element of event-based optical flow and propose a novel Temporal Motion Aggregation (TMA) approach to unlock its potential. Technically, TMA comprises three components: an event splitting strategy to incorporate intermediate motion information underlying the temporal context, a linear lookup strategy to align temporally fine-grained motion features and a novel motion pattern aggregation module to emphasize consistent patterns for motion feature enhancement. By incorporating temporally fine-grained motion information, TMA can derive better flow estimates than existing methods at early stages, which not only enables TMA to obtain more accurate final predictions, but also greatly reduces the demand for a number of refinements. Extensive experiments on DSEC-Flow and MVSEC datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our TMA. Remarkably, compared to E-RAFT, TMA achieves a 6\% improvement in accuracy and a 40\% reduction in inference time on DSEC-Flow. Code will be available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/TMA.

Mega-TTS: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech at Scale with Intrinsic Inductive Bias

Scaling text-to-speech to a large and wild dataset has been proven to be highly effective in achieving timbre and speech style generalization, particularly in zero-shot TTS. However, previous works usually encode speech into latent using audio codec and use autoregressive language models or diffusion models to generate it, which ignores the intrinsic nature of speech and may lead to inferior or uncontrollable results. We argue that speech can be decomposed into several attributes (e.g., content, timbre, prosody, and phase) and each of them should be modeled using a module with appropriate inductive biases. From this perspective, we carefully design a novel and large zero-shot TTS system called Mega-TTS, which is trained with large-scale wild data and models different attributes in different ways: 1) Instead of using latent encoded by audio codec as the intermediate feature, we still choose spectrogram as it separates the phase and other attributes very well. Phase can be appropriately constructed by the GAN-based vocoder and does not need to be modeled by the language model. 2) We model the timbre using global vectors since timbre is a global attribute that changes slowly over time. 3) We further use a VQGAN-based acoustic model to generate the spectrogram and a latent code language model to fit the distribution of prosody, since prosody changes quickly over time in a sentence, and language models can capture both local and long-range dependencies. We scale Mega-TTS to multi-domain datasets with 20K hours of speech and evaluate its performance on unseen speakers. Experimental results demonstrate that Mega-TTS surpasses state-of-the-art TTS systems on zero-shot TTS, speech editing, and cross-lingual TTS tasks, with superior naturalness, robustness, and speaker similarity due to the proper inductive bias of each module. Audio samples are available at https://mega-tts.github.io/demo-page.