# Towards Holistic Modeling for Video Frame Interpolation with Auto-regressive Diffusion Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 62 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (2017)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [Sequence Level Training with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06732/) (2015)
- [Infinity: Scaling Bitwise AutoRegressive Modeling for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04431/) (2024)
- [Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04628/) (2022)
- [DeepSpeed Ulysses: System Optimizations for Enabling Training of Extreme Long Sequence Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14509/) (2023)
- [Video Frame Interpolation via Adaptive Separable Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01692/) (2017)
- [Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06294/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Rejection Mixing: Fast Semantic Propagation of Mask Tokens for Efficient DLLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22868/) (2026)
- [CineWeaver: Training-Free Reference-Controllable Multi-Shot Long Video Generation for Cinematic Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26529/) (2026)
- [T2exture: Sparsely Perturbed Thermal-to-Texture Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02192/) (2026)
- [Accurate Motion Estimation with B'ezier Control Point for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23408/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing video frame interpolation (VFI) methods often adopt a frame-centric approach, processing videos as independent short segments (e.g., triplets), which leads to temporal inconsistencies and motion artifacts. To overcome this, we propose a holistic, video-centric paradigm named Local Diffusion Forcing for Video Frame Interpolation (LDF-VFI). Our framework is built upon an auto-regressive diffusion transformer that models the entire video sequence to ensure long-range temporal coherence. To mitigate error accumulation inherent in auto-regressive generation, we introduce a novel skip-concatenate sampling strategy that effectively maintains temporal stability. Furthermore, LDF-VFI incorporates sparse, local attention and tiled VAE encoding, a combination that not only enables efficient processing of long sequences but also allows generalization to arbitrary spatial resolutions (e.g., 4K) at inference without retraining. An enhanced conditional VAE decoder, which leverages multi-scale features from the input video, further improves reconstruction fidelity. Empirically, LDF-VFI achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging VFI benchmarks, demonstrating superior per-frame quality and temporal consistency, especially in scenes with large motion. The source code is available at https://github.com/xypeng9903/LDF-VFI.