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Nov 4

Phased DMD: Few-step Distribution Matching Distillation via Score Matching within Subintervals

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) distills score-based generative models into efficient one-step generators, without requiring a one-to-one correspondence with the sampling trajectories of their teachers. However, limited model capacity causes one-step distilled models underperform on complex generative tasks, e.g., synthesizing intricate object motions in text-to-video generation. Directly extending DMD to multi-step distillation increases memory usage and computational depth, leading to instability and reduced efficiency. While prior works propose stochastic gradient truncation as a potential solution, we observe that it substantially reduces the generation diversity of multi-step distilled models, bringing it down to the level of their one-step counterparts. To address these limitations, we propose Phased DMD, a multi-step distillation framework that bridges the idea of phase-wise distillation with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), reducing learning difficulty while enhancing model capacity. Phased DMD is built upon two key ideas: progressive distribution matching and score matching within subintervals. First, our model divides the SNR range into subintervals, progressively refining the model to higher SNR levels, to better capture complex distributions. Next, to ensure the training objective within each subinterval is accurate, we have conducted rigorous mathematical derivations. We validate Phased DMD by distilling state-of-the-art image and video generation models, including Qwen-Image (20B parameters) and Wan2.2 (28B parameters). Experimental results demonstrate that Phased DMD preserves output diversity better than DMD while retaining key generative capabilities. We will release our code and models.

sensenova SenseNova
·
Oct 31, 2025 1

CoDMD: Copula-aware Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Video Generation

Few-step distillation for video diffusion models has attracted significant attention, driven by the urgent demand for efficient deployment in real-world scenarios. However, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), a leading paradigm, tends to degrade under limited NFE budgets, manifesting in video generation as layout instability, oversaturation, and broken motion dynamics. We trace this failure to a structural limitation: standard DMD is an intra-sample distribution-matching objective with coordinate-wise gradients, and thus imposes no explicit constraint on the relational geometry across batch elements or temporal frames, leaving the underlying copula largely unregulated. Combined with the mode-seeking tendency of its reverse-KL objective, this absence of relational guidance makes DMD prone to collapsing into local optima in the few-step regime. Motivated by this insight, we propose Copula-aware DMD (CoDMD), a lightweight relational regularizer that reuses score estimates already produced by the frozen teacher and the online fake model to construct pairwise relation matrices across samples and frames. These are matched through a supplementary distributional objective that requires no additional networks, datasets, or sampling trajectories. On the Wan-2.1-T2V model series at 1.3B & 14B scales, CoDMD distills 50-step teachers into 4-step students, achieving an approximate 25times speed-up while attaining VBench scores of 84.46 & 84.87, outperforming prior trajectory-based (rCM 82.81 & 84.05) and distribution-based (DMD 83.38 & 83.81) methods.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 19

Where and When to Force: Routed Forcing for Streaming Avatars

Audio-driven streaming avatar generation requires real-time synthesis of speech-synchronized videos with dynamic and diverse motion. Self Forcing uses Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) to distill bidirectional video diffusion models into causal, few-step generators for real-time streaming. However, DMD minimizes a reverse KL divergence, which is inherently mode-seeking: it causes the student to discard high-dynamic modes and collapse onto static outputs, compressing both dynamics and diversity of generated videos. We find that this collapse is region-heterogeneous: person regions involving pose and gesture variations suffer the largest diversity loss, the audio-driven mouth region shows a small loss, and the background remains nearly stable. Based on this observation, we propose Routed Forcing, which routes the distillation objective by semantic region and noise stage to improve dynamics and diversity while preserving visual quality. Specifically, (1) Where to Force: Semantic-Region Routing applies Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), which supervises the student with real videos, to the person region where diversity collapse is most severe, while retaining DMD for the mouth and background to preserve lip synchronization and scene stability. (2) When to Force: Noise-Stage Routing activates DFD at high noise stages, where real video serves as effective supervision to inject diverse and dynamic motion patterns. At low noise stages, DMD is used to refine details, avoiding blur and artifacts from spatial differences between real video and student-generated video. Experiments show that Routed Forcing improves dynamics by up to 45% and diversity by 7-25% over Self Forcing, while preserving video quality and lip synchronization.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 24

BiWM: Advancing Open-Source Interactive Video World Models with Bidirectional Autoregression

Transitioning bidirectional video diffusion models into an autoregressive paradigm improves the interactivity of video world models, but existing causal pipelines need many stages (control fine-tuning, autoregressive training, causal initialization, few-step distillation) and still trail bidirectional models in quality due to error accumulation. Recent world models such as Yume-1.5 and Matrix-Game-3.0 instead adopt a bidirectional autoregressive approach, gaining fidelity and stable long-horizon rollout from self-correcting error propagation, yet open-source frameworks (e.g., minWM) support only causal models. We present BiWM, the first full-stack framework for interactive video world models under the bidirectional autoregressive paradigm, jointly optimizing generation quality and inference speed. From a pretrained video backbone, BiWM injects camera control by fine-tuning, then runs a few-step Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) stage that turns the backbone into an action/camera-controllable world model: just two training stages instead of four in minWM, converging in a few hundred steps on 8xH200 GPUs. A single recipe spans Wan2.1-1.3B, Wan2.2-5B, HunyuanVideo-1.5-8B, and LTX-2.3-22B, and also supports secondary fine-tuning of existing bidirectional models. BiWM enables real-world camera control where minWM loses controllability, integrates pluggable history compression (FramePack-style and PackForcing-style) for long rollouts, and offers an optional NVFP4 4-bit training/inference pipeline. To counter DMD's mode-seeking degradation, we add GAN and mass-covering forward-KL objectives that preserve scene dynamics. We open-source BiWM for resource-constrained research and high-fidelity environment simulation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 7

PDMD: Projected Distribution Matching Distillation for Video Diffusion Models

Modern video diffusion models require tens of denoising evaluations over long spatiotemporal token sequences. Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) reduces the number of function evaluations (NFE) to just a few. However, DMD samples can degrade during training, exhibiting progressive oversaturation and artifacts. We trace this instability to critic errors, which enter successive student updates and accumulate over time. We introduce Projected Distribution Matching Distillation (PDMD) to filter critic errors. PDMD projects out the component of the DMD update parallel to the student-critic endpoint residual. At a fixed noisy query, we prove that this residual is an unbiased estimate of the critic's endpoint error. Under high-dimensional assumptions, this projection removes a constant fraction of critic error while discarding only a vanishing fraction of ideal DMD signal. Empirically, the projection stabilizes training and improves sample quality where DMD degrades and develops unnatural textures. PDMD requires only a one-line code change to DMD, with no extra loss, network, data, model pass, or multi-stage training. With Wan2.1, PDMD achieves a VBench total score of 83.73 at 4 NFE, surpassing matched DMD by 1.03 points. On MiniMax-H3 joint video-audio generation, PDMD achieves a VideoGen-Eval visual total score of 83.17, 0.41 points above the strongest distilled baseline. PDMD also achieves the best performance on all six audio metrics among the compared 4-NFE models. Qualitative comparisons and user studies favor PDMD over the distilled baselines in visual quality, motion, and audio quality. Code and models are available at https://pdmd2026.github.io/.

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 27

Almost-Linear RNNs Yield Highly Interpretable Symbolic Codes in Dynamical Systems Reconstruction

Dynamical systems (DS) theory is fundamental for many areas of science and engineering. It can provide deep insights into the behavior of systems evolving in time, as typically described by differential or recursive equations. A common approach to facilitate mathematical tractability and interpretability of DS models involves decomposing nonlinear DS into multiple linear DS separated by switching manifolds, i.e. piecewise linear (PWL) systems. PWL models are popular in engineering and a frequent choice in mathematics for analyzing the topological properties of DS. However, hand-crafting such models is tedious and only possible for very low-dimensional scenarios, while inferring them from data usually gives rise to unnecessarily complex representations with very many linear subregions. Here we introduce Almost-Linear Recurrent Neural Networks (AL-RNNs) which automatically and robustly produce most parsimonious PWL representations of DS from time series data, using as few PWL nonlinearities as possible. AL-RNNs can be efficiently trained with any SOTA algorithm for dynamical systems reconstruction (DSR), and naturally give rise to a symbolic encoding of the underlying DS that provably preserves important topological properties. We show that for the Lorenz and R\"ossler systems, AL-RNNs discover, in a purely data-driven way, the known topologically minimal PWL representations of the corresponding chaotic attractors. We further illustrate on two challenging empirical datasets that interpretable symbolic encodings of the dynamics can be achieved, tremendously facilitating mathematical and computational analysis of the underlying systems.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 18, 2024

Deep Embedded Multiplicative DMD for Algebra-Preserving Koopman Learning

Koopman theory turns nonlinear dynamics into a linear spectral problem. In computation, however, everything depends on a hard finite-dimensional choice: the observables must be expressive, nearly invariant under the dynamics, and, ideally, compatible with composition. Deep Koopman methods learn flexible coordinates, whereas structure-preserving methods enforce operator identities on fixed dictionaries. We combine these ideas by introducing Deep Embedded Multiplicative Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DeepMDMD), a method that learns a latent space and a partition of it, while enforcing the Koopman product rule as an exact algebraic constraint. Training alternates between an exact multiplicative operator update and a differentiable latent-clustering step that promotes Koopman closure. The result is a finite transition map on learned latent cells. Its nonzero spectrum lies on the unit circle, its dictionary is shaped by the dynamics rather than by ambient geometry, and forecasts are made in latent coordinates before being decoded to physical space. Across Hamiltonian, chaotic, and fluid examples, DeepMDMD learns dictionaries that are far more compact and dynamically coherent than those produced by geometric MDMD partitions. It reduces spectral pollution, reveals richer continuous-spectrum structure, and gives stable forecasts under severe noise. In high-dimensional flows, including a 158,624-dimensional cylinder wake and a noisy Re=20,000 lid-driven cavity, it preserves coherent structures and long-time spectral statistics where state-space MDMD fails. These results suggest a practical rule for Koopman learning: learn the coordinates, constrain the algebra.

Auto-Formulating Dynamic Programming Problems with Large Language Models

Dynamic programming (DP) is a fundamental method in operations research, but formulating DP models has traditionally required expert knowledge of both the problem context and DP techniques. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential to automate this process. However, DP problems pose unique challenges due to their inherently stochastic transitions and the limited availability of training data. These factors make it difficult to directly apply existing LLM-based models or frameworks developed for other optimization problems, such as linear or integer programming. We introduce DP-Bench, the first benchmark covering a wide range of textbook-level DP problems to enable systematic evaluation. We present Dynamic Programming Language Model (DPLM), a 7B-parameter specialized model that achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art LLMs like OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, and surpasses them on hard problems. Central to DPLM's effectiveness is DualReflect, our novel synthetic data generation pipeline, designed to scale up training data from a limited set of initial examples. DualReflect combines forward generation for diversity and backward generation for reliability. Our results reveal a key insight: backward generation is favored in low-data regimes for its strong correctness guarantees, while forward generation, though lacking such guarantees, becomes increasingly valuable at scale for introducing diverse formulations. This trade-off highlights the complementary strengths of both approaches and the importance of combining them.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 31

RepForcing: Representation-Space Initialization for Autoregressive Video Distillation

Distilling pretrained video diffusion models into few-step autoregressive (AR) generators typically combines student initialization with distribution matching distillation (DMD). An intermediate AR teacher can provide causally compatible targets for ODE initialization. However, causally compatible targets alone do not ensure high-quality generation under a short sampling schedule. We analyze the posterior-mean predictions favored by direct latent regression and empirically find that causal ODE initialization alleviates blur but still leaves fine detail unresolved. To address this limitation, we propose Representation Forcing, which learns few-step causal initialization through representation-space supervision rather than intermediate-teacher trajectory regression. The student is trained with teacher forcing by comparing clean predictions and training targets through normalized features of a frozen video diffusion transformer. This phase reuses the synthetic videos generated by a bidirectional model for AR teacher training and replaces both teacher training and causal ODE distillation, without generating additional causal ODE trajectories. The subsequent asymmetric DMD procedure remains unchanged. Empirical results show that, at four sampling steps, RepForcing better preserves generation quality than intermediate-teacher-based initialization before DMD. After DMD, our four-step chunk-wise model improves VBench Total from 84.04 to 84.66 (+0.62 points) and VisionReward from 6.326 to 10.074 (+59.25%) over the reported causal-ODE-based baseline.

DPM-OT: A New Diffusion Probabilistic Model Based on Optimal Transport

Sampling from diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) can be viewed as a piecewise distribution transformation, which generally requires hundreds or thousands of steps of the inverse diffusion trajectory to get a high-quality image. Recent progress in designing fast samplers for DPMs achieves a trade-off between sampling speed and sample quality by knowledge distillation or adjusting the variance schedule or the denoising equation. However, it can't be optimal in both aspects and often suffer from mode mixture in short steps. To tackle this problem, we innovatively regard inverse diffusion as an optimal transport (OT) problem between latents at different stages and propose the DPM-OT, a unified learning framework for fast DPMs with a direct expressway represented by OT map, which can generate high-quality samples within around 10 function evaluations. By calculating the semi-discrete optimal transport map between the data latents and the white noise, we obtain an expressway from the prior distribution to the data distribution, while significantly alleviating the problem of mode mixture. In addition, we give the error bound of the proposed method, which theoretically guarantees the stability of the algorithm. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and advantages of DPM-OT in terms of speed and quality (FID and mode mixture), thus representing an efficient solution for generative modeling. Source codes are available at https://github.com/cognaclee/DPM-OT

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis

Recent approaches have shown promises distilling diffusion models into efficient one-step generators. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) produces one-step generators that match their teacher in distribution, without enforcing a one-to-one correspondence with the sampling trajectories of their teachers. However, to ensure stable training, DMD requires an additional regression loss computed using a large set of noise-image pairs generated by the teacher with many steps of a deterministic sampler. This is costly for large-scale text-to-image synthesis and limits the student's quality, tying it too closely to the teacher's original sampling paths. We introduce DMD2, a set of techniques that lift this limitation and improve DMD training. First, we eliminate the regression loss and the need for expensive dataset construction. We show that the resulting instability is due to the fake critic not estimating the distribution of generated samples accurately and propose a two time-scale update rule as a remedy. Second, we integrate a GAN loss into the distillation procedure, discriminating between generated samples and real images. This lets us train the student model on real data, mitigating the imperfect real score estimation from the teacher model, and enhancing quality. Lastly, we modify the training procedure to enable multi-step sampling. We identify and address the training-inference input mismatch problem in this setting, by simulating inference-time generator samples during training time. Taken together, our improvements set new benchmarks in one-step image generation, with FID scores of 1.28 on ImageNet-64x64 and 8.35 on zero-shot COCO 2014, surpassing the original teacher despite a 500X reduction in inference cost. Further, we show our approach can generate megapixel images by distilling SDXL, demonstrating exceptional visual quality among few-step methods.

  • 7 authors
·
May 23, 2024 1

UniSwap: Streaming Audio-Visual Identity Swapping for Talking Videos

Talking-video character replacement requires coordinated transfer of appearance and voice while preserving the source motion, scene, linguistic content, and audio-video timing. Existing methods use separately optimized models for the two modalities, making audio-visual consistency difficult to enforce. We present UniSwap, the first framework for streaming joint audio-visual identity replacement in talking videos. Given a source video, a reference image, and a reference voice clip, UniSwap transfers the reference appearance and vocal timbre within a single audio-visual diffusion transformer while preserving the source content and dynamics. To address the scarcity of aligned cross-identity training pairs, we introduce a swap-and-reconstruct pipeline that removes visual and vocal identity from real clips and uses the original clips as reconstruction targets. Starting from a bidirectional backbone, we progressively adapt the model through In-context Pretraining for joint replacement, Conditional Streaming Adaptation for block-causal KV-cached generation, and Efficient Self-forcing DMD for mitigating exposure bias and reducing sampling from 30 to 3 denoising steps per block. Efficient Multi-LoRA Switching enables the three DMD roles to share a single frozen backbone. Feature-RoPE Decomposition keeps cached positions within the training range, supporting stable long-form inference. Experiments demonstrate strong audio-visual synchronization, competitive identity preservation, efficient streaming, and stable long-form generation.

DistillAlign: Coordinating Mode Covering and Mode Seeking in Autoregressive Video Distillation

Existing autoregressive video distillation methods commonly adopt a Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD)-based multi-stage pipeline. However, they typically decouple the initialization and DMD stages -- which then pursue different target distributions -- and judge the intermediate student mainly by visual scores such as VBench. In this paper, we revisit this design from a distributional perspective. Given the mode-seeking nature of the distribution matching loss, a good initialization should match the mode coverage of the target DMD teacher, rather than merely pursuing high quality. To analyze this, we introduce a distributional evaluation protocol that measures precision and coverage between student and teacher distributions in a shared latent space. It exposes differences hidden by visual scores: some initializations reach high precision but low coverage, leading to suboptimal refinement, while mode-covering ones preserve broader support. Furthermore, even when the target distributions are aligned, DMD's reverse-KL objective can still drive the student toward high-probability teacher regions in late training, reducing coverage and diversity. To address this, we propose joint distillation, which combines DMD's mode-seeking objective with a Consistency Distillation-based mode-covering constraint. Experiments show that our method improves generation quality, coverage, and diversity; notably, even with a Wan-1.3B DMD teacher, it outperforms baselines refined with Wan-14B, underscoring the importance of distributional alignment in autoregressive video distillation.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 28 2

Salt++: Context-Aligned Post-Training for Few-Step Streaming Multimodal Generation

Few-step streaming audio--video generation requires both causal modeling and step distillation, yet standard training recipes face two context-related challenges. Teacher forcing pairs clean history with a noisy target, but supervises predictive contextual representations only indirectly through velocity prediction. Meanwhile, directly reusing bidirectional score models in causal Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) creates a mismatch between generation and scoring contexts. We address these challenges with Salt++, a two-stage post-training framework comprising Causal Self-Flow (CSF) and context-aligned autoregressive DMD. CSF exploits contextual information asymmetry by varying the history while keeping the noisy target fixed: a noise-mixed-history student aligns its intermediate representations with those of a clean-history exponential-moving-average teacher. This self-supervised signal encourages the student to extract semantic information and improves cross-modal alignment. Context-aligned AR DMD shares the causal mask and prefix across generator sampling, fake-score training, and real-score evaluation to match generated and reference distributions under a block-conditional KL objective. With calibrated teacher guidance, it performs clean-prefix few-step distillation and then adapts to generated histories without switching objectives or requiring separate consistency distillation. At 480p, Salt++ improves visual and motion quality by 57% and 45% over OmniForcing on JavisBench under the same 4-step causal setting. A separate scale-wise post-training stage extends Salt++ to 4-step 1664times960 generation, outperforming bidirectional LTX-2 on six of seven reported metrics. Project page: https://xingtongge.github.io/Saltpp

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 28 2

Beyond Teacher Assignment: Domain-Normalized Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation

Reinforcement learning can turn one language model into several specialists, each excellent at a single skill such as mathematics, coding or following instructions, but users need one model with all of these skills. Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) merges them by letting the specialists teach one student: the student answers each prompt, and the specialist for that prompt's domain gives feedback on every token. This routing decides which specialist teaches, but not how strongly its feedback moves the shared student. In Qwen3.5 models at three sizes, we find that MOPD's student does not beat one taught by the best single specialist and gains little of the mathematics specialist's advantage. The feedback is unbalanced: instruction-following feedback is several times more spread out than mathematics feedback and dominates the student's updates. We propose Domain-Normalized MOPD (DN-MOPD), which keeps the routing and rescales each domain's feedback by its measured spread. On six public benchmarks, DN-MOPD improves the average score over MOPD at every size, across three random seeds and under two answer-length limits, and recovers most of the lost mathematics gain. Controls with fixed domain weights show that the gain comes mainly from turning down instruction-following feedback rather than turning up mathematics alone, and that fixed weights close to those DN-MOPD measures perform comparably. Combining specialists therefore requires deciding not only which one teaches, but also how strongly its feedback counts.

LongTake: Learning to Sustain Dynamics in Long-Horizon Video Generation

World models, game simulators, and long-take video creation require coherent scene evolution and sustained dynamics over extended durations. Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion provides a natural framework for long-horizon generation, yet extended rollouts often become near-static or lose visual quality. We hypothesize that these failures reflect the limited guidance provided by short-video supervision on how ongoing scene dynamics develops over longer durations. This motivates us to introduce LongTake, a two-stage training pipeline built around Long-Horizon Teacher Forcing (TF) on curated real long videos. Long-Horizon TF trains the AR model to predict later frames conditioned on long ground-truth video prefixes, extending direct supervision beyond the short training horizon. This supervision is designed to help the model sustain dynamics and preserve visual quality during long-horizon generation. Our central finding is that this training stage strengthens direct initialization for distribution matching distillation (DMD) under student self-rollout, without the intermediate few-step distillation stage used in standard pipelines. Under the same five-second DMD training setup, our initialization yields substantially higher dynamic degree than short horizon TF initialization on 30-second rollouts at comparable aesthetic quality, and surpasses the evaluated baselines in both measures. Hybrid DMD further reuses this teacher to extend supervision to later frames of the self-rollout while retaining bidirectional joint supervision over the initial window. On long-horizon self-rollouts, LongTake lies on the Pareto front of dynamic degree and aesthetic quality, and Hybrid DMD attains the highest dynamic degree among evaluated methods at both 30s and 60s.

kaist-ai KAIST AI
·
Sep 28 1

Salt: Self-Consistent Distribution Matching with Cache-Aware Training for Fast Video Generation

Distilling video generation models to extremely low inference budgets (e.g., 2--4 NFEs) is crucial for real-time deployment, yet remains challenging. Trajectory-style consistency distillation often becomes conservative under complex video dynamics, yielding an over-smoothed appearance and weak motion. Distribution matching distillation (DMD) can recover sharp, mode-seeking samples, but its local training signals do not explicitly regularize how denoising updates compose across timesteps, making composed rollouts prone to drift. To overcome this challenge, we propose Self-Consistent Distribution Matching Distillation (SC-DMD), which explicitly regularizes the endpoint-consistent composition of consecutive denoising updates. For real-time autoregressive video generation, we further treat the KV cache as a quality parameterized condition and propose Cache-Distribution-Aware training. This training scheme applies SC-DMD over multi-step rollouts and introduces a cache-conditioned feature alignment objective that steers low-quality outputs toward high-quality references. Across extensive experiments on both non-autoregressive backbones (e.g., Wan~2.1) and autoregressive real-time paradigms (e.g., Self Forcing), our method, dubbed Salt, consistently improves low-NFE video generation quality while remaining compatible with diverse KV-cache memory mechanisms. Source code will be released at https://github.com/XingtongGe/Salt{https://github.com/XingtongGe/Salt}.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 2 2