An Empirical Study of Autoregressive Pre-training from Videos
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Abstract (arXiv)
We empirically study autoregressive pre-training from videos. To perform our study, we construct a series of autoregressive video models, called Toto. We treat videos as sequences of visual tokens and train transformer models to autoregressively predict future tokens. Our models are pre-trained on a diverse dataset of videos and images comprising over 1 trillion visual tokens. We explore different architectural, training, and inference design choices. We evaluate the learned visual representations on a range of downstream tasks including image recognition, video classification, object tracking, and robotics. Our results demonstrate that, despite minimal inductive biases, autoregressive pre-training leads to competitive performance across all benchmarks. Finally, we find that scaling our video models results in similar scaling curves to those seen in language models, albeit with a different rate. More details at https://brjathu.github.io/toto/
Key facts. Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 54 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2025.
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12 most cited of 14 All 14 (JSON)
- 2026TT-VidT: Decoupling the Temporal Axis for Efficient Motion-Centric Video Pretraining27 Sep 2026
- 2026Uncovering the Latent Potential of Deep Intermediate Representations21 May 2026
- 2026What Cohort INRs Encode and Where to Freeze Them8 May 2026
- 2026VideoFlexTok: Flexible-Length Coarse-to-Fine Video Tokenization14 Apr 2026
- 2026V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learning15 Mar 2026
- 2025Tracking by Predicting 3-D Gaussians Over Time27 Dec 2025
- 2025Chirality in Action: Time-Aware Video Representation Learning by Latent Straightening10 Sep 2025
- 2025Frozen Forecasting: A Unified Evaluation18 Jul 2025
- 2025Scaling Laws for Optimal Data Mixtures12 Jul 2025
- 2025Learning Streaming Video Representation via Multitask Training28 Apr 2025
- 2025Perception Encoder: The best visual embeddings are not at the output of the network17 Apr 2025
- 2025Scaling Laws for Native Multimodal Models10 Apr 2025
12 newest of 14 All 14 (JSON)