Self-Refining Video Sampling

Modern video generators still struggle with complex physical dynamics, often falling short of physical realism. Existing approaches address this using external verifiers or additional training on augmented data, which is computationally expensive and still limited in capturing fine-grained motion. In this work, we present self-refining video sampling, a simple method that uses a pre-trained video generator trained on large-scale datasets as its own self-refiner. By interpreting the generator as a denoising autoencoder, we enable iterative inner-loop refinement at inference time without any external verifier or additional training. We further introduce an uncertainty-aware refinement strategy that selectively refines regions based on self-consistency, which prevents artifacts caused by over-refinement. Experiments on state-of-the-art video generators demonstrate significant improvements in motion coherence and physics alignment, achieving over 70\% human preference compared to the default sampler and guidance-based sampler.

Beyond Rigid: Benchmarking Non-Rigid Video Editing

Despite the remarkable progress in text-driven video editing, generating coherent non-rigid deformations remains a critical challenge, often plagued by physical distortion and temporal flicker. To bridge this gap, we propose NRVBench, the first dedicated and comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate non-rigid video editing. First, we curate a high-quality dataset consisting of 180 non-rigid motion videos from six physics-based categories, equipped with 2,340 fine-grained task instructions and 360 multiple-choice questions. Second, we propose NRVE-Acc, a novel evaluation metric based on Vision-Language Models that can rigorously assess physical compliance, temporal consistency, and instruction alignment, overcoming the limitations of general metrics in capturing complex dynamics. Third, we introduce a training-free baseline, VM-Edit, which utilizes a dual-region denoising mechanism to achieve structure-aware control, balancing structural preservation and dynamic deformation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while current methods have shortcomings in maintaining physical plausibility, our method achieves excellent performance across both standard and proposed metrics. We believe the benchmark could serve as a standard testing platform for advancing physics-aware video editing.

A Constrained Optimization Perspective of Unrolled Transformers

We introduce a constrained optimization framework for training transformers that behave like optimization descent algorithms. Specifically, we enforce layerwise descent constraints on the objective function and replace standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) with a primal-dual training scheme. This approach yields models whose intermediate representations decrease the loss monotonically in expectation across layers. We apply our method to both unrolled transformer architectures and conventional pretrained transformers on tasks of video denoising and text classification. Across these settings, we observe constrained transformers achieve stronger robustness to perturbations and maintain higher out-of-distribution generalization, while preserving in-distribution performance.

PocketDVDNet: Realtime Video Denoising for Real Camera Noise

Live video denoising under realistic, multi-component sensor noise remains challenging for applications such as autofocus, autonomous driving, and surveillance. We propose PocketDVDNet, a lightweight video denoiser developed using our model compression framework that combines sparsity-guided structured pruning, a physics-informed noise model, and knowledge distillation to achieve high-quality restoration with reduced resource demands. Starting from a reference model, we induce sparsity, apply targeted channel pruning, and retrain a teacher on realistic multi-component noise. The student network learns implicit noise handling, eliminating the need for explicit noise-map inputs. PocketDVDNet reduces the original model size by 74% while improving denoising quality and processing 5-frame patches in real-time. These results demonstrate that aggressive compression, combined with domain-adapted distillation, can reconcile performance and efficiency for practical, real-time video denoising.

CoMoVi: Co-Generation of 3D Human Motions and Realistic Videos

In this paper, we find that the generation of 3D human motions and 2D human videos is intrinsically coupled. 3D motions provide the structural prior for plausibility and consistency in videos, while pre-trained video models offer strong generalization capabilities for motions, which necessitate coupling their generation processes. Based on this, we present CoMoVi, a co-generative framework that couples two video diffusion models (VDMs) to generate 3D human motions and videos synchronously within a single diffusion denoising loop. To achieve this, we first propose an effective 2D human motion representation that can inherit the powerful prior of pre-trained VDMs. Then, we design a dual-branch diffusion model to couple human motion and video generation process with mutual feature interaction and 3D-2D cross attentions. Moreover, we curate CoMoVi Dataset, a large-scale real-world human video dataset with text and motion annotations, covering diverse and challenging human motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both 3D human motion and video generation tasks.

PhysRVG: Physics-Aware Unified Reinforcement Learning for Video Generative Models

Physical principles are fundamental to realistic visual simulation, but remain a significant oversight in transformer-based video generation. This gap highlights a critical limitation in rendering rigid body motion, a core tenet of classical mechanics. While computer graphics and physics-based simulators can easily model such collisions using Newton formulas, modern pretrain-finetune paradigms discard the concept of object rigidity during pixel-level global denoising. Even perfectly correct mathematical constraints are treated as suboptimal solutions (i.e., conditions) during model optimization in post-training, fundamentally limiting the physical realism of generated videos. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce, for the first time, a physics-aware reinforcement learning paradigm for video generation models that enforces physical collision rules directly in high-dimensional spaces, ensuring the physics knowledge is strictly applied rather than treated as conditions. Subsequently, we extend this paradigm to a unified framework, termed Mimicry-Discovery Cycle (MDcycle), which allows substantial fine-tuning while fully preserving the model's ability to leverage physics-grounded feedback. To validate our approach, we construct new benchmark PhysRVGBench and perform extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to thoroughly assess its effectiveness.

Inference-time Physics Alignment of Video Generative Models with Latent World Models

State-of-the-art video generative models produce promising visual content yet often violate basic physics principles, limiting their utility. While some attribute this deficiency to insufficient physics understanding from pre-training, we find that the shortfall in physics plausibility also stems from suboptimal inference strategies. We therefore introduce WMReward and treat improving physics plausibility of video generation as an inference-time alignment problem. In particular, we leverage the strong physics prior of a latent world model (here, VJEPA-2) as a reward to search and steer multiple candidate denoising trajectories, enabling scaling test-time compute for better generation performance. Empirically, our approach substantially improves physics plausibility across image-conditioned, multiframe-conditioned, and text-conditioned generation settings, with validation from human preference study. Notably, in the ICCV 2025 Perception Test PhysicsIQ Challenge, we achieve a final score of 62.64%, winning first place and outperforming the previous state of the art by 7.42%. Our work demonstrates the viability of using latent world models to improve physics plausibility of video generation, beyond this specific instantiation or parameterization.

Transition Matching Distillation for Fast Video Generation

Large video diffusion and flow models have achieved remarkable success in high-quality video generation, but their use in real-time interactive applications remains limited due to their inefficient multi-step sampling process. In this work, we present Transition Matching Distillation (TMD), a novel framework for distilling video diffusion models into efficient few-step generators. The central idea of TMD is to match the multi-step denoising trajectory of a diffusion model with a few-step probability transition process, where each transition is modeled as a lightweight conditional flow. To enable efficient distillation, we decompose the original diffusion backbone into two components: (1) a main backbone, comprising the majority of early layers, that extracts semantic representations at each outer transition step; and (2) a flow head, consisting of the last few layers, that leverages these representations to perform multiple inner flow updates. Given a pretrained video diffusion model, we first introduce a flow head to the model, and adapt it into a conditional flow map. We then apply distribution matching distillation to the student model with flow head rollout in each transition step. Extensive experiments on distilling Wan2.1 1.3B and 14B text-to-video models demonstrate that TMD provides a flexible and strong trade-off between generation speed and visual quality. In particular, TMD outperforms existing distilled models under comparable inference costs in terms of visual fidelity and prompt adherence. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/tmd

Mixture of Distributions Matters: Dynamic Sparse Attention for Efficient Video Diffusion Transformers

While Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved notable progress in video generation, this long-sequence generation task remains constrained by the quadratic complexity inherent to self-attention mechanisms, creating significant barriers to practical deployment. Although sparse attention methods attempt to address this challenge, existing approaches either rely on oversimplified static patterns or require computationally expensive sampling operations to achieve dynamic sparsity, resulting in inaccurate pattern predictions and degraded generation quality. To overcome these limitations, we propose a \underline{\textbf{M}}ixtrue-\underline{\textbf{O}}f-\underline{\textbf{D}}istribution \textbf{DiT} (\textbf{MOD-DiT}), a novel sampling-free dynamic attention framework that accurately models evolving attention patterns through a two-stage process. First, MOD-DiT leverages prior information from early denoising steps and adopts a {distributed mixing approach} to model an efficient linear approximation model, which is then used to predict mask patterns for a specific denoising interval. Second, an online block masking strategy dynamically applies these predicted masks while maintaining historical sparsity information, eliminating the need for repetitive sampling operations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate consistent acceleration and quality improvements across multiple benchmarks and model architectures, validating MOD-DiT's effectiveness for efficient, high-quality video generation while overcoming the computational limitations of traditional sparse attention approaches.

ELITE: Efficient Gaussian Head Avatar from a Monocular Video via Learned Initialization and TEst-time Generative Adaptation

We introduce ELITE, an Efficient Gaussian head avatar synthesis from a monocular video via Learned Initialization and TEst-time generative adaptation. Prior works rely either on a 3D data prior or a 2D generative prior to compensate for missing visual cues in monocular videos. However, 3D data prior methods often struggle to generalize in-the-wild, while 2D generative prior methods are computationally heavy and prone to identity hallucination. We identify a complementary synergy between these two priors and design an efficient system that achieves high-fidelity animatable avatar synthesis with strong in-the-wild generalization. Specifically, we introduce a feed-forward Mesh2Gaussian Prior Model (MGPM) that enables fast initialization of a Gaussian avatar. To further bridge the domain gap at test time, we design a test-time generative adaptation stage, leveraging both real and synthetic images as supervision. Unlike previous full diffusion denoising strategies that are slow and hallucination-prone, we propose a rendering-guided single-step diffusion enhancer that restores missing visual details, grounded on Gaussian avatar renderings. Our experiments demonstrate that ELITE produces visually superior avatars to prior works, even for challenging expressions, while achieving 60x faster synthesis than the 2D generative prior method.