Parallel Context Modeling for Sliding Window Attention in Neural Video Coding

Most neural video codecs rely on temporal conditioning, which makes them susceptible to error propagation over long sequences. While Transformer-based architectures like the VCT offer a drift-free alternative, they suffer from high computational complexity and inferior RD performance. The recent SWA addresses these shortcomings by reducing complexity and enhancing RD performance, yet it restricts decoding to a strictly sequential raster-scan order, creating a critical bottleneck in decoding latency. To resolve this, we propose P-SWA, utilizing diagonal wavefronts to enable parallel decoding. By embedding a hyperprior and introducing an accumulator to fuse side information and local spatial context, our method increases decoding speed by 36% over the parallel VCT. Simultaneously, it achieves Bjøntegaard Delta-rate savings of up to 10.0% for I-frames and 7.1% for P-frames over the SWA baseline.