# Progressive Growing of Video Tokenizers for Temporally Compact Latent Spaces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05442 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05442/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 40 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (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)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08608/) (2024)
- [Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13131/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06662/) (2023)
- [Geometric GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02894/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Toward Diffusible High-Dimensional Latent Spaces: A Frequency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22249/) (2025)
- [DeRA: Decoupled Representation Alignment for Video Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04483/) (2025)
- [VideoTok4D: A 4D-Aware Video Tokenizer for Compact World Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12874/) (2026)
- [GRACE: Generation-aware latent compression for efficient video generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10524/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video tokenizers are essential for latent video diffusion models, converting raw video data into spatiotemporally compressed latent spaces for efficient training. However, extending state-of-the-art video tokenizers to achieve a temporal compression ratio beyond 4x without increasing channel capacity poses significant challenges. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to enhance temporal compression. We find that the reconstruction quality of temporally subsampled videos from a low-compression encoder surpasses that of high-compression encoders applied to original videos. This indicates that high-compression models can leverage representations from lower-compression models. Building on this insight, we develop a bootstrapped high-temporal-compression model that progressively trains high-compression blocks atop well-trained lower-compression models. Our method includes a cross-level feature-mixing module to retain information from the pretrained low-compression model and guide higher-compression blocks to capture the remaining details from the full video sequence. Evaluation of video benchmarks shows that our method significantly improves reconstruction quality while increasing temporal compression compared to directly training the full model. Furthermore, the resulting compact latent space effectively trains a video diffusion model for high-quality video generation with a significantly reduced token budget.