TinyHistory: Lightweight Video History Embeddings via Two-Stage Context Learning

History context is central to autoregressive video generation, driving consistency and storytelling for both commercial models and personal use cases. For example, personal users, offline workflows, and individual-scale finetuning need to encode longer video histories under tight compute and memory budgets. We observe that content and identity consistency is an essential requirement, and that complete, uninterrupted history coverage together with content query and interpretation capabilities is broadly desired. We present TinyHistory, a lightweight history embedding learned through two-stage context learning. In the first stage, we pretrain the encoder on large-scale video data with a randomized frame query objective; in the second stage, we repurpose the pretrained encoder within an autoregressive video diffusion model to learn content-level consistency. As a result, we show that the learned lightweight embeddings achieve consistency comparable (by VLM, VBench, ELO, etc) to heavier alternatives, while reducing training overhead and extending the encodable history length within a given memory budget. We conduct ablation studies to analyze the influence and trade-offs of each component.