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OPSD-V: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Post-Training Few-Step Autoregressive Video Generators

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AuthorsHongyu Liu et al.
Year2026
HF Upvotes8
arXiv2607.08766
PDFDownload
HF PageView on Hugging Face

Abstract

We propose OPSD-V, an on-policy self-distillation paradigm for post-training few-step autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models. Existing few-step AR video generators can produce long videos with low latency, but still suffer from error accumulation and weakened motion dynamics during long autoregressive rollout. OPSD-V reduces long-horizon degradation while preserving the original few-step inference path. The key idea is to introduce real long-video data as temporal context during training and use it to provide dense trajectory-level supervision. Specifically, the student follows the exact inference-time rollout, generating each chunk conditioned on its own previously generated KV cache. In parallel, the teacher is evaluated at the same student-visited denoising states, but uses a cleaner AR-consistent temporal cache in which older history can be replaced by real-video context. This provides dense denoising-level corrective targets under on-policy AR cache dynamics, without changing the sampler, number of denoising steps, or inference-time cache mechanism. We apply OPSD-V to representative few-step AR video models, including Self-Forcing and LongLive. Experiments show consistent improvements in visual quality, motion dynamics, and VBenchLong scores. A user study with 10 participants comparing 20 video pairs shows that OPSD-V is preferred over the base models in 66.0% of overall-preference judgments (82.5% excluding ties).


Engineering Breakdown

The Problem

Existing few-step AR video generators can produce long videos with low latency, but still suffer from error accumulation and weakened motion dynamics during long autoregressive rollout. In parallel, the teacher is evaluated at the same student-visited denoising states, but uses a cleaner AR-consistent temporal cache in which older history can be replaced by real-video context.

The Approach

We propose OPSD-V, an on-policy self-distillation paradigm for post-training few-step autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models.

Key Results

A user study with 10 participants comparing 20 video pairs shows that OPSD-V is preferred over the base models in 66.0% of overall-preference judgments (82.5% excluding ties).

Research Areas

This paper contributes to the following areas of AI/ML engineering:

  • Machine learning
  • Deep learning
  • Neural networks
  • Model optimization
  • AI systems
  • Selfdistillation

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