# GenRec: Unifying Video Generation and Recognition with Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15241 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15241/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 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 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

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

- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03011/) (2023)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [InternVideo: General Video Foundation Models via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03191/) (2022)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [VideoFusion: Decomposed Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08320/) (2023)
- [Pix2Video: Video Editing using Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12688/) (2023)
- [MCVD: Masked Conditional Video Diffusion for Prediction, Generation, and Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09853/) (2022)
- [Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00989/) (2023)
- [Preserve Your Own Correlation: A Noise Prior for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10474/) (2023)
- [Long Video Generation with Time-Agnostic VQGAN and Time-Sensitive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03638/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17697/) (2024)
- [MagicMotion: Controllable Video Generation with Dense-to-Sparse Trajectory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16421/) (2025)
- [StableAvatar: Infinite-Length Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08248/) (2025)
- [UniGen: Enhanced Training & Test-Time Strategies for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14682/) (2025)
- [Code2Video: A Code-centric Paradigm for Educational Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01174/) (2025)
- [From Image to Video: An Empirical Study of Diffusion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07001/) (2025)
- [StableAnimator++: Overcoming Pose Misalignment and Face Distortion for Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15064/) (2025)
- [FlashPortrait: 6x Faster Infinite Portrait Animation with Adaptive Latent Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16900/) (2025)
- [SAMPO:Scale-wise Autoregression with Motion PrOmpt for generative world models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15536/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-Based Action Recognition Generalizes to Untrained Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08908/) (2025)
- [Improving Video Diffusion Transformer Training by Multi-Feature Fusion and Alignment from Self-Supervised Vision Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09547/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video diffusion models are able to generate high-quality videos by learning strong spatial-temporal priors on large-scale datasets. In this paper, we aim to investigate whether such priors derived from a generative process are suitable for video recognition, and eventually joint optimization of generation and recognition. Building upon Stable Video Diffusion, we introduce GenRec, the first unified framework trained with a random-frame conditioning process so as to learn generalized spatial-temporal representations. The resulting framework can naturally supports generation and recognition, and more importantly is robust even when visual inputs contain limited information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of GenRec for both recognition and generation. In particular, GenRec achieves competitive recognition performance, offering 75.8% and 87.2% accuracy on SSV2 and K400, respectively. GenRec also performs the best on class-conditioned image-to-video generation, achieving 46.5 and 49.3 FVD scores on SSV2 and EK-100 datasets. Furthermore, GenRec demonstrates extraordinary robustness in scenarios that only limited frames can be observed. Code will be available at https://github.com/wengzejia1/GenRec.