Efficient Video Diffusion Models: Advancements and Challenges

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

数据科学与分析学域

PhD Qualifying Examination

By Mr. SHAO, Shitong

摘要

Video diffusion models have rapidly become the dominant paradigm for high-fidelity generative video synthesis, but their practical deployment remains constrained by severe inference costs. Compared with image generation, video synthesis compounds computation across spatial-temporal token growth and iterative denoising, making attention and memory traffic major bottlenecks in real-world settings. This survey provides a systematic and deployment-oriented review of efficient video diffusion models. We propose a unified categorization that organizes existing methods into four classes of main paradigms, including step distillation, efficient attention, model compression, and cache/trajectory optimization. Building on this categorization, we respectively analyze algorithmic trends of these four paradigms and examine how different design choices target two core objectives: reducing the number of function evaluations and minimizing per-step overhead. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions, including quality preservation under composite acceleration, hardware-software co-design, robust real-time long-horizon generation, and open infrastructure for standardized evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first comprehensive survey on efficient video diffusion models, offering researchers and engineers a structured overview of the field and its emerging research directions.

PQE Committee

Chair: Prof. TANG, Nan

Prime Supervisor: Prof. XIE, Zeke

Co-Supervisor: Prof. WU, Kaishun

Examiner: Prof. WEN, Zeyi