# Causal Forcing: Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation Done Right for High-Quality Real-Time Interactive Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02214 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02214/

## Key facts

- Cited by 184 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 76 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (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)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (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)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13447/) (2025)
- [VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19512/) (2023)
- [All are Worth Words: A ViT Backbone for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12152/) (2022)
- [VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14125/) (2023)
- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14189/) (2023)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 184)

- [Matrix-Game 3.0: Real-Time and Streaming Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08995/) (2026)
- [Helios: Real Real-Time Long Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04379/) (2026)
- [Causal Forcing++: Scalable Few-Step Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation for Real-Time Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15141/) (2026)
- [WoVR: World Models as Reliable Simulators for Post-Training VLA Policies with RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13977/) (2026)
- [Infinite Worlds with Versatile Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07534/) (2026)
- [DreamX-World 1.0: A General-Purpose Interactive World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16993/) (2026)
- [Rolling Sink: Bridging Limited-Horizon Training and Open-Ended Testing in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07775/) (2026)
- [LongLive-2.0: An NVFP4 Parallel Infrastructure for Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18739/) (2026)
- [ABot-M0.5: Unified Mobility-and-Manipulation World Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00678/) (2026)
- [MemRoPE: Training-Free Infinite Video Generation via Evolving Memory Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12513/) (2026)
- [MosaicMem: Hybrid Spatial Memory for Controllable Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17117/) (2026)
- [Causal-rCM: A Unified Teacher-Forcing and Self-Forcing Open Recipe for Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation in Streaming Video Generation and Interactive World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25473/) (2026)
- [Relax Forcing: Relaxed KV-Memory for Consistent Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21366/) (2026)
- [MultiWorld: Scalable Multi-Agent Multi-View Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18564/) (2026)
- [minWM: A Full-Stack Open-Source Framework for Real-Time Interactive Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30263/) (2026)
- [MBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark on Memory Capability for Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00793/) (2026)
- [Self Gradient Forcing: Native Long Video Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20368/) (2026)
- [OmniForcing: Unleashing Real-time Joint Audio-Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11647/) (2026)
- [LongLive-RAG: A General Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02553/) (2026)
- [ABot-World-0: Infinite Interactive World Rollout on a Single Desktop GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19191/) (2026)
- [HiAR: Efficient Autoregressive Long Video Generation via Hierarchical Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08703/) (2026)
- [Forcing-KV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09681/) (2026)
- [WorldKV: Efficient World Memory with World Retrieval and Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22718/) (2026)
- [One-Forcing: Towards Stable One-Step Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23458/) (2026)
- [LiveEdit: Towards Real-Time Diffusion-Based Streaming Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26740/) (2026)
- [Wonder: Video World Model Done Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26037/) (2026)
- [ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17730/) (2026)
- [OPSD-V: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Post-Training Few-Step Autoregressive Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08766/) (2026)
- [Alaya-EVOKE: From Linear-Scaling Supervision to Endless World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13546/) (2026)
- [Code World Model: Coding Agent as World Brain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25927/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To achieve real-time interactive video generation, current methods distill pretrained bidirectional video diffusion models into few-step autoregressive (AR) models, facing an architectural gap when full attention is replaced by causal attention. However, existing approaches do not bridge this gap theoretically. They initialize the AR student via ODE distillation, which requires frame-level injectivity, where each noisy frame must map to a unique clean frame under the PF-ODE of an AR teacher. Distilling an AR student from a bidirectional teacher violates this condition, preventing recovery of the teacher's flow map and instead inducing a conditional-expectation solution, which degrades performance. To address this issue, we propose Causal Forcing, which uses an autoregressive teacher for ODE initialization to bridge the architectural gap, and then applies the same DMD procedure as in Self Forcing. Empirical results show that our method outperforms all baselines across all metrics, surpassing the SOTA Self Forcing by 19.3% in Dynamic Degree, 8.7% in VisionReward, and 16.7% in Instruction Following. Project page: hrefhttps://thu-ml.github.io/CausalForcing.github.io/https://thu-ml.github.io/CausalForcing.github.io/; the code: hrefhttps://github.com/thu-ml/Causal-Forcinghttps://github.com/thu-ml/Causal-Forcing.