# VideoCanvas: Unified Video Completion from Arbitrary Spatiotemporal Patches via In-Context Conditioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19512/) (2023)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15098/) (2024)
- [MCVD: Masked Conditional Video Diffusion for Prediction, Generation, and Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09853/) (2022)
- [Navigation World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03572/) (2024)
- [SEINE: Short-to-Long Video Diffusion Model for Generative Transition and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20700/) (2023)
- [Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15977/) (2024)
- [BrushNet: A Plug-and-Play Image Inpainting Model with Decomposed Dual-Branch Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06976/) (2024)
- [ProPainter: Improving Propagation and Transformer for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03897/) (2023)
- [Koala-36M: A Large-scale Video Dataset Improving Consistency between Fine-grained Conditions and Video Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08260/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [AVControl: Efficient Framework for Training Audio-Visual Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24793/) (2026)
- [Towards Holistic Modeling for Video Frame Interpolation with Auto-regressive Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14959/) (2026)
- [KeyFrame-Compass: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation of Keyframe-Conditioned Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14202/) (2026)
- [ShotPlan: Cinematic Video Generation with Learnable Planning Token](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17675/) (2026)
- [CatPortrait: Taming Video Generative Models for Portrait Animation via In-context Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14957/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing controllable video generation methods are typically designed for rigid, task-specific settings, such as first-frame image-to-video, inpainting, or interpolation, treating spatio-temporal control as a set of isolated problems. We formalize a unified task, arbitrary spatio-temporal video completion, where a model generates a coherent video from user-specified patches placed at any spatial location and timestamp. However, realizing such a unified framework within modern latent video diffusion models is non-trivial: causal video VAEs compress multiple frames into a single latent slot, making frame-level conditioning fundamentally ill-posed, and directly feeding sparsely populated, zero-padded video inputs into the VAE leads to severe out-of-distribution artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose VideoCanvas, a simple yet effective framework that adapts the In-Context Conditioning paradigm to arbitrary spatio-temporal completion without modifying or retraining the VAE. Our key idea is a hybrid conditioning strategy that decouples spatial and temporal control: spatially, we encode zero-padded full-frame canvases in image mode to keep VAE inputs in-distribution, and temporally we use Temporal RoPE Interpolation to assign each condition a continuous fractional index in the latent sequence for precise frame-level alignment. To evaluate this capability, we develop VideoCanvasBench, the first benchmark for arbitrary spatio-temporal video completion, covering both intra-scene fidelity and inter-scene creativity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoCanvas achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse range of video generation tasks under a single, unified framework.