# Snap Video: Scaled Spatiotemporal Transformers for Text-to-Video Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14797 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14797/

## Key facts

- Cited by 105 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [Large Batch Optimization for Deep Learning: Training BERT in 76 minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00962/) (2019)
- [Maximum Likelihood Training of Score-Based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09258/) (2021)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03011/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 105)

- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [CameraCtrl: Enabling Camera Control for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02101/) (2024)
- [ReCamMaster: Camera-Controlled Generative Rendering from A Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11647/) (2025)
- [CAT4D: Create Anything in 4D with Multi-View Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18613/) (2024)
- [VD3D: Taming Large Video Diffusion Transformers for 3D Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12781/) (2024)
- [AC3D: Analyzing and Improving 3D Camera Control in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18673/) (2024)
- [MiraData: A Large-Scale Video Dataset with Long Durations and Structured Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06358/) (2024)
- [Wonderland: Navigating 3D Scenes from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12091/) (2024)
- [CameraCtrl II: Dynamic Scene Exploration via Camera-controlled Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10592/) (2025)
- [Improving the Diffusability of Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14831/) (2025)
- [TC4D: Trajectory-Conditioned Text-to-4D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17920/) (2024)
- [ReCapture: Generative Video Camera Controls for User-Provided Videos using Masked Video Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05003/) (2024)
- [Ctrl-Adapter: An Efficient and Versatile Framework for Adapting Diverse Controls to Any Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09967/) (2024)
- [Multi-subject Open-set Personalization in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06187/) (2025)
- [4Real: Towards Photorealistic 4D Scene Generation via Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07472/) (2024)
- [Sora as a World Model? A Complete Survey on Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05131/) (2024)
- [MarDini: Masked Autoregressive Diffusion for Video Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20280/) (2024)
- [StreamDiT: Real-Time Streaming Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03745/) (2025)
- [FullDiT: Multi-Task Video Generative Foundation Model with Full Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19907/) (2025)
- [VBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13503/) (2024)
- [PhysMotion: Physics-Grounded Dynamics From a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17189/) (2024)
- [ReSim: Reliable World Simulation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09981/) (2025)
- [SF-V: Single Forward Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04324/) (2024)
- [Mind the Time: Temporally-Controlled Multi-Event Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05263/) (2024)
- [Video Motion Transfer with Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07776/) (2024)
- [BitsFusion: 1.99 bits Weight Quantization of Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04333/) (2024)
- [Free4D: Tuning-free 4D Scene Generation with Spatial-Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20785/) (2025)
- [OmniHuman-1.5: Instilling an Active Mind in Avatars via Cognitive Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19209/) (2025)
- [Taming Data and Transformers for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19388/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contemporary models for generating images show remarkable quality and versatility. Swayed by these advantages, the research community repurposes them to generate videos. Since video content is highly redundant, we argue that naively bringing advances of image models to the video generation domain reduces motion fidelity, visual quality and impairs scalability. In this work, we build Snap Video, a video-first model that systematically addresses these challenges. To do that, we first extend the EDM framework to take into account spatially and temporally redundant pixels and naturally support video generation. Second, we show that a U-Net - a workhorse behind image generation - scales poorly when generating videos, requiring significant computational overhead. Hence, we propose a new transformer-based architecture that trains 3.31 times faster than U-Nets (and is ~4.5 faster at inference). This allows us to efficiently train a text-to-video model with billions of parameters for the first time, reach state-of-the-art results on a number of benchmarks, and generate videos with substantially higher quality, temporal consistency, and motion complexity. The user studies showed that our model was favored by a large margin over the most recent methods. See our website at https://snap-research.github.io/snapvideo/.