# LinVideo: A Post-Training Framework towards O(n) Attention in Efficient Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08318 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08318/

## 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 56 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [SiT: Exploring Flow and Diffusion-based Generative Models with Scalable Interpolant Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08740/) (2024)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [Learned Step Size Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08153/) (2019)
- [Up or Down? Adaptive Rounding for Post-Training Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10568/) (2020)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10629/) (2024)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [Seedance 1.0: Exploring the Boundaries of Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09113/) (2025)
- [Sparse VideoGen: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers with Spatial-Temporal Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01776/) (2025)

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

- [End-to-End Training for Autoregressive Video Diffusion via Self-Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15702/) (2025)
- [Salt: Self-Consistent Distribution Matching with Cache-Aware Training for Fast Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03118/) (2026)
- [Light Forcing: Accelerating Autoregressive Video Diffusion via Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04789/) (2026)
- [Flash-VAED: Plug-and-Play VAE Decoders for Efficient Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19161/) (2026)
- [Efficient Video Diffusion Models: Advancements and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15911/) (2026)
- [Video Generation Models as World Models: Efficient Paradigms, Architectures and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28489/) (2026)
- [MobileI2V: Fast and High-Resolution Image-to-Video on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21475/) (2025)
- [Light Interaction: Training-Free Inference Acceleration for Interactive Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31158/) (2026)
- [Omni-LiveAvatar: Minute-Level Real-Time Streaming Joint Audio-Video Avatar Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13602/) (2026)
- [Dynamic-in-Few-Step: Unifying Dynamic Computation and Few-Step Distillation for Efficient Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06631/) (2026)
- [LinMorph: Learning to Morph Weights for Efficient Video DiT Linearization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17914/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video diffusion models (DMs) have enabled high-quality video synthesis. However, their computation costs scale quadratically with sequence length because self-attention has quadratic complexity. While linear attention lowers the cost, fully replacing quadratic attention requires expensive pretraining due to the limited expressiveness of linear attention and the complexity of spatiotemporal modeling in video generation. In this paper, we present LinVideo, an efficient data-free post-training framework that replaces a target number of self-attention modules with linear attention while preserving the original model's performance. First, we observe a significant disparity in the replaceability of different layers. Instead of manual or heuristic choices, we frame layer selection as a binary classification problem and propose selective transfer, which automatically and progressively converts layers to linear attention with minimal performance impact. Additionally, to overcome the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of existing objectives for this transfer process, we introduce an anytime distribution matching (ADM) objective that aligns the distributions of samples across any timestep along the sampling trajectory. This objective is efficient and recovers model performance. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves a 1.25-2.00x speedup while preserving generation quality, and our 4-step distilled model further delivers a 15.92x latency reduction with minimal visual quality drop.