Abstract:Transformer-based video diffusion models rely on 3D attention over spatial and temporal tokens, which incurs quadratic time and memory complexity and makes end-to-end training for ultra-high-resolution videos prohibitively expensive. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a pure image adaptation framework that upgrades a video Diffusion Transformer pre-trained at its native scale to synthesize higher-resolution videos. Unfortunately, naively fine-tuning with high-resolution images alone often introduces noticeable noise due to the image-video modality gap. To address this, we decouple the learning objective to separately handle modality alignment and spatial extrapolation. At the core of our approach is Relay LoRA, a two-stage adaptation strategy. In the first stage, the video diffusion model is adapted to the image domain using low-resolution images to bridge the modality gap. In the second stage, the model is further adapted with high-resolution images to acquire spatial extrapolation capability. During inference, only the high-resolution adaptation is retained to preserve the video generation modality while enabling high-resolution video synthesis. To enhance fine-grained detail synthesis, we further propose a High-Frequency-Awareness-Training-Objective, which explicitly encourages the model to recover high-frequency components from degraded latent representations via a dedicated reconstruction loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces ultra-high-resolution videos with rich visual details without requiring any video training data, even outperforming previous state-of-the-art models trained on high-resolution videos by 0.8 on the VBench benchmark. Code will be available at https://github.com/WillWu111/ViBe.
Abstract:The quadratic time and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in modern Transformer based video generators makes end-to-end training for ultra high resolution videos prohibitively expensive. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce a training-free approach that leverages video Diffusion Transformers pretrained at their native scale to synthesize higher resolution videos without any additional training or adaptation. At the core of our method lies an inward sliding window attention mechanism, which originates from a key observation: maintaining each query token's training scale receptive field is crucial for preserving visual fidelity and detail. However, naive local window attention, unfortunately, often leads to repetitive content and exhibits a lack of global coherence in the generated results. To overcome this challenge, we devise a dual-path pipeline that backs up window attention with a novel cross-attention override strategy, enabling the semantic content produced by local attention to be guided by another branch with a full receptive field and, therefore, ensuring holistic consistency. Furthermore, to improve efficiency, we incorporate a cross-attention caching strategy for this branch to avoid the frequent computation of full 3D attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method delivers ultra-high-resolution videos with fine-grained visual details and high efficiency in a training-free paradigm. Meanwhile, it achieves superior performance on VBench, even compared to training-based alternatives, with competitive or improved efficiency. Codes are available at: https://github.com/WillWu111/FreeSwim