# Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion with Dummy Head

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20499/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 45 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (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)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [SnapKV: LLM Knows What You are Looking for Before Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14469/) (2024)
- [H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14048/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19512/) (2023)
- [InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06942/) (2023)
- [Model Tells You What to Discard: Adaptive KV Cache Compression for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01801/) (2023)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [PyramidKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression based on Pyramidal Information Funneling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02069/) (2024)
- [MInference 1.0: Accelerating Pre-filling for Long-Context LLMs via Dynamic Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02490/) (2024)
- [Show-1: Marrying Pixel and Latent Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15818/) (2023)
- [DuoAttention: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference with Retrieval and Streaming Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10819/) (2024)
- [MAGI-1: Autoregressive Video Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13211/) (2025)
- [Timestep Embedding Tells: It's Time to Cache for Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19108/) (2024)
- [LongLive: Real-time Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22622/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Helios: Real Real-Time Long Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04379/) (2026)
- [Forcing-KV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09681/) (2026)
- [Echo-Forcing: A Scene Memory Framework for Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16003/) (2026)
- [Elastic Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13993/) (2026)
- [PreciseCache: Precise Feature Caching for Efficient and High-fidelity Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00976/) (2026)
- [Future Forcing: Future-aware Training-free KV Cache Policy for Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30083/) (2026)
- [HeadCast: Casting Attention Heads for Efficient Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20125/) (2026)
- [Attend Locally, Remember Linearly: Linear Attention as Cross-Frame Memory for Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16579/) (2026)
- [OmniMem: Scalable and Adaptive Memory Retrieval for Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30519/) (2026)
- [LayerRecall: A State-Conditioned Memory Router for Long-Horizon Consistency in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28460/) (2026)
- [Ultra Flash: Scaling Real-Time Streaming Video Generation to High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09150/) (2026)
- [Focused Forcing: Content-Aware Per-Frame KV Selection for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18346/) (2026)
- [Towards Memory-Efficient Autoregressive Video Generation via Instance-Specific Parametric Absorption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00712/) (2026)
- [Ms. Forcing: Efficient Streaming Video Generation with Multi-Scale Patchification and Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20940/) (2026)
- [EchoTorrent: Towards Swift, Sustained, and Streaming Multi-Modal Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13669/) (2026)
- [UnStep: Training-Free Acceleration of Causal Video Diffusion with Fewer Steps Than Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32518/) (2026)
- [DeCoPrune: Efficient KV-Cache Pruning for Autoregressive Video Diffusion via Denoising Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39096/) (2026)
- [TRAC: Trajectory-aware Reuse and Adaptive Correction for Efficient Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02779/) (2026)
- [FrameFold: Response-Guided KV Cache Consolidation for Autoregressive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14568/) (2026)
- [TempoKV: Predictive KV Cache Quantization for Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15324/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The autoregressive video diffusion model has recently gained considerable research interest due to its causal modeling and iterative denoising. In this work, we identify that the multi-head self-attention in these models under-utilizes historical frames: approximately 25% heads attend almost exclusively to the current frame, and discarding their KV caches incurs only minor performance degradation. Building upon this, we propose Dummy Forcing, a simple yet effective method to control context accessibility across different heads. Specifically, the proposed heterogeneous memory allocation reduces head-wise context redundancy, accompanied by dynamic head programming to adaptively classify head types. Moreover, we develop a context packing technique to achieve more aggressive cache compression. Without additional training, our Dummy Forcing delivers up to 2.0x speedup over the baseline, supporting video generation at 24.3 FPS with less than 0.5% quality drop. Project page is available at https://csguoh.github.io/project/DummyForcing/.