# SSM Meets Video Diffusion Models: Efficient Long-Term Video Generation with Structured State Spaces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07711/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 51 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)
- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Video, motion and generative Mamba models](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/video-motion-and-generative-mamba-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04933/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02792/) (2025)
- [Video World Models with Long-term Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05284/) (2025)
- [Long-Context State-Space Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20171/) (2025)
- [VideoSSM: Autoregressive Long Video Generation with Hybrid State-Space Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04519/) (2025)
- [Inference-Time Text-to-Video Alignment with Diffusion Latent Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19252/) (2025)
- [Mamba in Vision: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03105/) (2024)
- [A Mechanistic View on Video Generation as World Models: State and Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17067/) (2026)
- [DIM-WAM: World-Action Modeling with Diverse Historical Event Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27677/) (2026)
- [Causality in Video Diffusers is Separable from Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10095/) (2026)
- [Attend Locally, Remember Linearly: Linear Attention as Cross-Frame Memory for Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16579/) (2026)
- [GG-SSMs: Graph-Generating State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12423/) (2024)
- [Time-Scaling State-Space Models for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03426/) (2025)
- [FoSS: Modeling Long Range Dependencies and Multimodal Uncertainty in Trajectory Prediction via Fourier State Space Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01284/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given the remarkable achievements in image generation through diffusion models, the research community has shown increasing interest in extending these models to video generation. Recent diffusion models for video generation have predominantly utilized attention layers to extract temporal features. However, attention layers are limited by their computational costs, which increase quadratically with the sequence length. This limitation presents significant challenges when generating longer video sequences using diffusion models. To overcome this challenge, we propose leveraging state-space models (SSMs) as temporal feature extractors. SSMs (e.g., Mamba) have recently gained attention as promising alternatives due to their linear-time memory consumption relative to sequence length. In line with previous research suggesting that using bidirectional SSMs is effective for understanding spatial features in image generation, we found that bidirectionality is also beneficial for capturing temporal features in video data, rather than relying on traditional unidirectional SSMs. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on multiple long-term video datasets, such as MineRL Navigate, across various model sizes. For sequences up to 256 frames, SSM-based models require less memory to achieve the same FVD as attention-based models. Moreover, SSM-based models often deliver better performance with comparable GPU memory usage. Our codes are available at https://github.com/shim0114/SSM-Meets-Video-Diffusion-Models.