# RFDM: Residual Flow Diffusion Model for Efficient Causal Video Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06871 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06871/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 51 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09535/) (2023)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [Pix2Video: Video Editing using Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12688/) (2023)
- [Understanding Diffusion Objectives as the ELBO with Simple Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00848/) (2023)
- [MAGI-1: Autoregressive Video Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13211/) (2025)
- [Learning Blind Video Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00449/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [TokenFlow: Unified Image Tokenizer for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03069/) (2024)
- [FLATTEN: optical FLow-guided ATTENtion for consistent text-to-video editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05922/) (2023)
- [AnyV2V: A Tuning-Free Framework For Any Video-to-Video Editing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14468/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Video Editing Using Off-The-Shelf Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17599/) (2023)
- [Space-Time Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot Text-Driven Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17009/) (2023)
- [Long-Context Autoregressive Video Modeling with Next-Frame Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19325/) (2025)
- [RAVE: Randomized Noise Shuffling for Fast and Consistent Video Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04524/) (2023)
- [VidToMe: Video Token Merging for Zero-Shot Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10656/) (2023)
- [VideoControlNet: A Motion-Guided Video-to-Video Translation Framework by Using Diffusion Model with ControlNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14073/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [EditStream: A Unified Autoregressive Framework for Interactive Video Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21424/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instructional video editing applies edits to an input video using only text prompts, enabling intuitive natural-language control. Despite rapid progress, most methods still require fixed-length inputs and substantial compute. Meanwhile, autoregressive video generation enables efficient variable-length synthesis, yet remains under-explored for video editing. We introduce a causal, efficient video editing model that edits variable-length videos frame by frame. For efficiency, we start from a 2D image-to-image (I2I) diffusion model and adapt it to video-to-video (V2V) editing by conditioning the edit at time step t on the model's prediction at t-1. To leverage videos' temporal redundancy, we propose a new I2I diffusion forward process formulation that encourages the model to predict the residual between the target output and the previous prediction. We call this Residual Flow Diffusion Model (RFDM), which focuses the denoising process on changes between consecutive frames. Moreover, we propose a new benchmark that better ranks state-of-the-art methods for editing tasks. Trained on paired video data for global/local style transfer and object removal, RFDM surpasses I2I-based methods and competes with fully spatiotemporal (3D) V2V models, while matching the compute of image models and scaling independently of input video length. More content can be found in: https://smsd75.github.io/RFDM_page/