# Seaweed-7B: Cost-Effective Training of Video Generation Foundation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08685 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08685/

## Key facts

- Cited by 82 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 69 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (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)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Seedance 1.0: Exploring the Boundaries of Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09113/) (2025)
- [Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15564/) (2025)
- [Rolling Forcing: Autoregressive Long Video Diffusion in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25161/) (2025)
- [Seedance 2.0: Advancing Video Generation for World Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14148/) (2026)
- [SANA-Video: Efficient Video Generation with Block Linear Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24695/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09350/) (2025)
- [OpenS2V-Nexus: A Detailed Benchmark and Million-Scale Dataset for Subject-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20292/) (2025)
- [RewardDance: Reward Scaling in Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08826/) (2025)
- [Waver: Wave Your Way to Lifelike Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15761/) (2025)
- [SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05301/) (2025)
- [Captain Cinema: Towards Short Movie Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18634/) (2025)
- [Vision as a Dialect: Unifying Visual Understanding and Generation via Text-Aligned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18898/) (2025)
- [ATI: Any Trajectory Instruction for Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22944/) (2025)
- [OneStory: Coherent Multi-Shot Video Generation with Adaptive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07802/) (2025)
- [DenseDPO: Fine-Grained Temporal Preference Optimization for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03517/) (2025)
- [TUNA: Taming Unified Visual Representations for Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02014/) (2025)
- [OmniHuman-1.5: Instilling an Active Mind in Avatars via Cognitive Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19209/) (2025)
- [AToken: A Unified Tokenizer for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14476/) (2025)
- [Transition Matching Distillation for Fast Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09881/) (2026)
- [Omni-Effects: Unified and Spatially-Controllable Visual Effects Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07981/) (2025)
- [WorldExplorer: Towards Generating Fully Navigable 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01799/) (2025)
- [DreamArt: Generating Interactable Articulated Objects from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05763/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Interactive Generative Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21853/) (2025)
- [CineTechBench: A Benchmark for Cinematographic Technique Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15145/) (2025)
- [PanoWan: Lifting Diffusion Video Generation Models to 360deg with Latitude/Longitude-aware Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22016/) (2025)
- [DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10568/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Fine-grained Preference Optimization for Physically Plausible Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10858/) (2025)
- [InterActHuman: Multi-Concept Human Animation with Layout-Aligned Audio Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09984/) (2025)
- [Seed3D 1.0: From Images to High-Fidelity Simulation-Ready 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19944/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This technical report presents a cost-efficient strategy for training a video generation foundation model. We present a mid-sized research model with approximately 7 billion parameters (7B) called Seaweed-7B trained from scratch using 665,000 H100 GPU hours. Despite being trained with moderate computational resources, Seaweed-7B demonstrates highly competitive performance compared to contemporary video generation models of much larger size. Design choices are especially crucial in a resource-constrained setting. This technical report highlights the key design decisions that enhance the performance of the medium-sized diffusion model. Empirically, we make two observations: (1) Seaweed-7B achieves performance comparable to, or even surpasses, larger models trained on substantially greater GPU resources, and (2) our model, which exhibits strong generalization ability, can be effectively adapted across a wide range of downstream applications either by lightweight fine-tuning or continue training. See the project page at https://seaweed.video/