Rethinking Video Tokenization: A Conditioned Diffusion-based Approach

Video tokenizers, which transform videos into compact latent representations, are key to video generation. Existing video tokenizers are based on the VAE architecture and follow a paradigm where an encoder compresses videos into compact latents, and a deterministic decoder reconstructs the original videos from these latents. In this paper, we propose a novel \underline{\textbf{C}}onditioned \underline{\textbf{D}}iffusion-based video \underline{\textbf{T}}okenizer entitled \textbf{\ourmethod}, which departs from previous methods by replacing the deterministic decoder with a 3D causal diffusion model. The reverse diffusion generative process of the decoder is conditioned on the latent representations derived via the encoder. With a feature caching and sampling acceleration, the framework efficiently reconstructs high-fidelity videos of arbitrary lengths. Results show that {\ourmethod} achieves state-of-the-art performance in video reconstruction tasks using just a single-step sampling. Even a smaller version of {\ourmethod} still achieves reconstruction results on par with the top two baselines. Furthermore, the latent video generation model trained using {\ourmethod} also shows superior performance.