Source-linked AI summary

Accelerating Video Diffusion via Training-Free Trajectory Routing

Mustafa Munir, Huy Vu, Shreyas Misra, Rohit Jena, Sajad Norouzi, Ali Taghibakhshi, Anis Ahmad, Anjul Patney, Pavlo Molchanov, Nima Tajbakhsh

arXiv:2609.30096v1cs.CVcs.AI

TL;DR

Video diffusion remains expensive because denoisers must run repeatedly, including at every step of distilled pipelines. TRACK calibrates large–small model disagreement to route steps, achieving 1.95×–2.73× speedups across four pipelines at comparable-quality operating points.

  • Problem

    Video diffusion inference repeatedly executes costly large models, while smaller checkpoints run faster but can reduce generation quality.

    Source: Introduction · p. 1
  • Method

    TRACK calibrates normalized guided-prediction disagreement on shared large-model reference latents, then routes each step to one compatible large or small denoiser.

    Source: Introduction · p. 2, Conclusion · p. 9
  • Results

    Across four video diffusion pipelines, TRACK delivers 1.95×–2.73× speedups at selected comparable-quality operating points.

    Source: Conclusion · p. 9
  • Takeaways & Limitations

    TRACK adds a model-switching acceleration axis that complements step-distillation by lowering the average cost of distilled steps.

    Source: Conclusion · p. 9

    TRACK requires storing both large and small models simultaneously, increasing deployment memory relative to a single-model pipeline.

    Source: Limitations and Future Work · p. 18

Abstract

from arXiv · show

Video diffusion is computationally expensive, as it requires executing a large model across many denoising steps. Even with step-distillation, inference remains expensive because every distilled step still requires a costly model evaluation. We present TRACK: TRajectory-Aware Capacity routing via top-K selection, a heterogeneous denoising strategy that switches between compatible large and small models at selected steps, reducing the average cost per denoising evaluation. The switching steps are determined using a calibration process. TRACK first rolls out a reference trajectory with the large model. Then at each step, the small model's prediction is also collected and compared against the large model's prediction to obtain a relative disagreement score. Both models receive the same latent, timestep, conditioning, and guidance inputs. Aggregating this signal over a calibration set produces a disagreement score map across diffusion steps, which determines a switching policy for an efficient inference process: quality-sensitive steps keep using the large model, while steps with low disagreement scores are routed to the small model. Inference executes only the selected model at each step, requiring no retraining, architecture or scheduler changes, or online dual-model evaluation. Across Wan 2.1, Cosmos 3, TurboDiffusion, and FastVideo, TRACK yields $1.95\times$, $2.04\times$-$2.73\times$, $2.69\times$, and $2.17\times$ speedups, respectively, with comparable aggregate quality and high diversity retention. TRACK thereby establishes automated, training-free model switching as a practical acceleration paradigm for video diffusion.

Introduction

Video diffusion inference remains costly because large denoisers run repeatedly, while smaller checkpoints trade speed for quality. TRACK calibrates disagreement between compatible large and small models to route individual steps, reporting speedups across four pipelines while maintaining comparable quality and diversity.

Introduction

  • TRACK addresses the speed–quality trade-off by allocating model capacity at individual steps instead of relying on rigid temporal handoffs or uniform-cost evaluations.Such handoffs can miss step-specific disagreement in spatial detail, camera motion, or frame consistency, while uncalibrated capacity reduction risks sample diversity.Source: Introduction · p. 1
  • Offline calibration compares guided predictions from both models on the same large-model reference latent, timestep, conditioning, and guidance to create a step-level switching policy.At inference, the policy routes quality-sensitive steps to the large model and low-disagreement steps to the small model, with one denoiser evaluation per step.Source: Introduction · pp. 1–2, Figure 1 · p. 2
  • TRACK achieves 1.95× speedup on Wan 2.1, 2.04×–2.73× on Cosmos 3, 2.69× on four-step TurboDiffusion, and 2.17× on three-step FastVideo at comparable visual quality.Multi-seed evaluations also confirm diversity retention.Source: Introduction · p. 2
  • TRACK generalizes permanent large-to-small handoffs to disagreement-calibrated fixed-budget allocation, supporting contiguous or non-contiguous schedules without changing weights, architectures, or schedulers.The approach requires no online dual-model evaluation.Source: Introduction · p. 2
  • Spatial and latent-temporal frequency analyses indicate that large–small prediction disagreement varies by phase, explaining why some intermediate timesteps tolerate reduced model capacity.The contribution also reports similar diversity retention to the all-large baseline.Source: Introduction · p. 2

Related Work

Video diffusion’s repeated denoising evaluations make inference costly, while existing acceleration approaches target step count or per-step computation. TRACK instead calibrates which denoising steps can use a smaller model, then executes a single selected model at each step.

Diffusion Models for Visual Generation; Adaptive and Multi-Model Diffusion

Efficient Diffusion Inference

  • TRACK complements step-reduction and per-step acceleration by lowering average model cost while retaining the target sampler and step count.Its application to three-step FastVideo and four-step TurboDiffusion demonstrates compatibility with step-distilled pipelines.Source: Efficient Diffusion Inference · p. 3

Adaptive and Multi-Model Diffusion

  • TRACK derives an offline, disagreement-calibrated policy for switching between compatible large and small checkpoints, without retraining, architectural changes, or online dual-model evaluation.Unlike one-way handoffs such as T-Stitch [27] and SRDiffusion [6], its policy can switch between models at individual steps.Source: Adaptive and Multi-Model Diffusion · p. 3

Proposed Methodology

  • TRACK uses two stages: offline calibration measures step-level model disagreement on a shared reference trajectory, then inference follows the resulting policy with one denoiser per step.The method does not modify model weights or the scheduler.Source: Proposed Methodology · pp. 3–4

Preliminaries

  • Compatible checkpoints must share latent representation, output shape, conditioning interfaces, prediction target, and scheduler semantics, while the policy assigns a model size to each step.TRACK preserves the timestep sequence and scheduler-state evolution; its objective is to reduce denoising cost using a small one-time calibration set.Source: Preliminaries · p. 4

Reference-Trajectory Calibration

  • Calibration rolls out each prompt with the large checkpoint and probes both models on the same latent and inputs before each scheduler update.The large-model prediction advances the reference trajectory; paired evaluations and their cost are confined to offline calibration.Source: Reference-Trajectory Calibration · p. 4

Normalized Prediction Disagreement

  • The normalized disagreement score compares paired guided predictions, with lower aggregated step scores indicating closer agreement and a safer candidate for small-model execution.The score is normalized by the large-model prediction magnitude and averaged across calibration prompts.Source: Normalized Prediction Disagreement · pp. 4–5

Constrained Trajectory Divergence Minimization using Top-K Switching

  • For a fixed budget K, TRACK assigns the K lowest-disagreement steps to the small model and keeps the large model at the remaining steps.The separable objective admits an integral solution, and the threshold C0 can directly specify the number or fraction of small-model steps.Source: Constrained Trajectory Divergence… · p. 5

Experimental Results

TRACK reduces inference cost across many-step and few-step video diffusion pipelines while preserving comparable quality. Its disagreement analysis identifies safer switching steps, and equal-budget comparisons favor TRACK over heuristic switching policies in quality and diversity.

Experimental Setup

  • Tests pair large and small checkpoints across four native pipelines, evaluate 250 prompt pairs, and measure diversity separately with shared-seed DreamSim comparisons.The human study compares same-prompt videos on visual quality and prompt adherence, with at least 150 judgments per pipeline.Source: Experimental Setup · p. 6

Quantitative and Qualitative Results

  • TRACK achieves 1.95× speedup on Wan 2.1, 2.04×–2.73× on Cosmos 3, 2.17× on 3-step FastVideo, and 2.69× on 4-step TurboDiffusion.These operating points retain each pipeline’s native scheduler and step count.Source: Quantitative and Qualitative Results · p. 6
  • Wan 2.1 and Cosmos 3 preserve subject and background consistency, while TurboDiffusion and FastVideo remain comparable across metrics and calibration generalizes to the full benchmark.Figure 5 shows TRACK preserving scene composition, subject identity, and motion patterns relative to the all-large baseline.Source: Quantitative and Qualitative Results · pp. 6–7, Figure 5 · p. 8

User Study

  • Human raters found 67–79% prompt-adherence ties and no consistent preference for the full model; visual-quality wins were comparable or slightly favored TRACK on three pipelines.TRACK’s visual-quality win shares were 37.7% vs. 34.7% on TurboDiffusion, 38% vs. 35.3% on FastVideo, and 32.0% vs. 26.0% on Cosmos 3.Source: Figure 3 · p. 6, User Study · p. 7

Analysis of Disagreement across Denoising Steps

  • Disagreement is high at the initial and final Wan 2.1 steps but low in the middle, especially the latter half; early error is low-frequency, while late error shifts to mid and high frequencies.The frequency pattern is consistent with early coarse-structure formation and late fine-detail refinement.Source: Analysis of Disagreement across… · p. 7

Equal-Budget Policy Ablations and Diversity Retention Analysis

  • At equal K, TRACK Top-K outperforms First-K, Last-K, and Random-K on Wan 2.1 quality and diversity, with initial large-model steps associated with diversity retention.The comparison uses K=30; the initial steps remain with the large model because switchable steps are mostly in the middle.Source: Equal-Budget Policy Ablations and… · pp. 8–9, Table 2 · p. 8

Conclusion

TRACK calibrates compatible large and small video diffusion checkpoints to select switchable denoising steps, without retraining or changing scheduler behavior. Across four pipelines, it delivers 1.95×–2.73× speedups at comparable-quality operating points.

Conclusion

  • TRACK calibrates compatible independently trained checkpoints on all-large reference latents, uses normalized guided-prediction disagreement to select switchable steps, and runs one model per inference step.It changes neither model weights nor scheduler behavior and requires no online dual-model comparison.Source: Conclusion · p. 9
  • Across Wan 2.1, Cosmos 3, FastVideo, and TurboDiffusion, TRACK provides 1.95×–2.73× speedups at selected comparable-quality operating points.The gains on three- and four-step pipelines show complementarity with step-distillation.Source: Conclusion · p. 9
  • Trajectory analyses show structured large–small disagreement, while equal-budget tests find better quality and diversity than heuristic switching policies.Together, these results support model switching as an additional practical axis for accelerating video diffusion while maintaining quality.Source: Conclusion · p. 9

Supplementary Material

The budget ablation finds a plateau where routing more steps to the small model leaves visual consistency stable or improves it, before excessive routing degrades quality. It uses lowest-disagreement steps first to identify a practical routing budget.

Supplementary Material

  • The ablation varies K, the number of denoising steps routed to the small model, across all four pipelines.It averages VBench temporal flicker, motion smoothness, subject consistency, and background consistency; routing selects steps with the lowest normalized disagreement scores.Source: Supplementary Material · p. 12, Figure 6 · p. 12
  • Figure 6 tracks average VBench visual-consistency scores across small-model step budgets to identify the maximum K before quality degrades.As K rises from zero, consistency can remain stable or improve before capacity reduction reaches quality-sensitive steps.Source: Figure 6 · p. 12, Supplementary Material · p. 12
  • K=28 on Cosmos 3 and K=40 on Wan 2.1 severely penalize consistency as routing approaches the full sampling-step count.The degradation follows an initial stable or improving plateau as K increases from the all-large baseline.Source: Supplementary Material · p. 12

Extended Analysis of Disagreement Scores Across Denoising Steps

Disagreement varies across denoising steps and model families: Cosmos 3 has a U-shaped profile, while TurboDiffusion and FastVideo decline monotonically. Frequency-band analysis also distinguishes their error patterns.

Extended Analysis of Disagreement Scores Across Denoising Steps

  • Cosmos 3 disagreement is high at the initial and final steps and lowest in the latter half, favoring switching in the middle steps.Its early disagreement is concentrated in the low band, while the late rise is carried by mid and high bands.Source: Extended Analysis of Disagreement… · p. 12
  • TurboDiffusion and FastVideo disagreement decreases monotonically from the first step to the last, without a late-step rise.Their disagreement remains low-frequency dominated throughout the trajectory.Source: Extended Analysis of Disagreement… · p. 12

Energy Consumption and Efficiency Gains

TRACK reduces GPU energy use across many-step and aggressively distilled video pipelines. Measurements isolate denoising-loop energy on one NVIDIA A100, and aggregate savings compare mean per-video energy.

Energy Consumption and Efficiency Gains

  • The paper frames reduced GPU energy consumption as relevant to deploying video generation at scale, where continuous denoiser execution carries power and thermal costs.The reported savings scale with the number of generated videos.Source: Energy Consumption and Efficiency Gains · p. 13
  • Energy savings are calculated from aggregate mean per-video energy, not by averaging individual per-video percentages.The denoising loop is measured with NVML on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU, excluding text encoding and VAE decoding overheads.Source: Energy Consumption and Efficiency Gains · p. 13
  • Three-step FastVideo and four-step TurboDiffusion save 54.4% and 45.6% energy, respectively, with over 1 kWh saved per 1,000 videos.These savings require no additional training or distillation.Source: Energy Consumption and Efficiency Gains · p. 13, Table 3 · p. 13
  • TRACK reduces video-generation energy by roughly 45% to 60%, saving up to 54 kWh per 1,000 videos on many-step models and over 1 kWh on step-distilled models.On Wan 2.1, it saves 194.57 kJ per video, or 54.05 kWh per 1,000 videos, a 49.3% reduction.Source: Table 3 · p. 13, Energy Consumption and Efficiency Gains · p. 13

Additional Quantitative Results

Against two SRDiffusion threshold variants, TRACK outperforms on video consistency and sample diversity retention. Its non-monotonic routing preserves visual fidelity and diversity, with visual inspection also assessing structural integrity.

Additional Quantitative Results

  • In an isolated comparison with SRDiffusion variants using thresholds 0.01 and 0.03, TRACK outperforms the baselines on both video consistency metrics and sample diversity retention.Source: Additional Quantitative Results · p. 14
  • SRDiffusion’s permanent monotonic handoff struggles to preserve high-frequency temporal details in final denoising steps, leading to loss of DreamSim diversity.TRACK instead routes the small model to low-disagreement steps and returns to the large model when needed.Source: Additional Quantitative Results · p. 14
  • Visual inspection finds scene composition, subject identity, and motion patterns remain intact relative to all-large outputs.The comparison is shown against contiguous handoff methods.Source: Additional Quantitative Results · p. 14

Additional Qualitative Results

TRACK’s qualitative comparisons across four video model families show that its switching policy retains key properties of large-model outputs while reducing latency.

Additional Qualitative Results

  • The qualitative comparisons cover all four model families, with the same prompt generated using the all-large baseline and TRACK switching policy.Source: Additional Qualitative Results · p. 14
  • Across Wan 2.1, Cosmos 3, TurboDiffusion, and FastVideo, TRACK preserves scene composition, subject identity, and motion patterns of large-model outputs while reducing inference latency.The comparison uses four evenly spaced frames for three prompts under the full large-model baseline and TRACK.Source: Additional Qualitative Results · p. 14, Figure 8 · p. 15
  • Figure 8 shows four frames at evenly spaced timestamps for three prompts under each model’s full large-model pipeline and TRACK configuration.Source: Figure 8 · p. 15

Extended Diversity Preservation Analysis

TRACK retains diversity close to the all-large reference across four video pipelines, while qualitative comparisons contrast it with a same-budget First-K schedule.

Extended Diversity Preservation Analysis

  • Diversity is measured as mean pairwise DreamSim distance across generated outputs, with higher distances indicating greater compositional and semantic diversity across seeds.Source: Extended Diversity Preservation Analysis · p. 16
  • The evaluation uses five standardized prompt categories and averages video features across four frames per video and eight seeds; retention relative to the all-large baseline is the primary metric.Source: Extended Diversity Preservation Analysis · p. 16
  • > 95% of large-model diversity is preserved across FastVideo, TurboDiffusion, Wan 2.1, and Cosmos 3 when the highest-capacity model handles critical denoising steps.The reported metric is mean pairwise DreamSim distance on a standardized five-category prompt set.Source: Table 5 · p. 16, Extended Diversity Preservation Analysis · p. 16
  • Across multiple seeds, TRACK preserves varied subjects, compositions, and styles of the all-large reference, whereas First-K shifts or narrows output modes.The comparison uses the same number of small-model evaluations for both switching policies.Source: Extended Diversity Preservation Analysis · p. 16, Figure 9 · p. 17

Limitations and Future Work

TRACK’s current deployment requires storing both large and small models, increasing memory use compared with a single-model pipeline; nested model families are proposed as future work.

Limitations and Future Work

  • TRACK currently requires storing both the large and small models simultaneously, increasing deployment memory compared with a single-model pipeline.Source: Limitations and Future Work · p. 18
  • The proposed future direction is to integrate TRACK with nested model families in which the small denoiser is a subnetwork of the large denoiser sharing its parameters.Source: Limitations and Future Work · p. 18
  • Under that nested design, one checkpoint could contain both full and reduced capacity models, eliminating the overhead of maintaining two separate models while retaining switching flexibility.Source: Limitations and Future Work · p. 18
Loading 2609.30096v1…