# DVD: Deterministic Video Depth Estimation with Generative Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12250 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12250/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (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)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [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)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08864/) (2023)
- [Prevalence of Neural Collapse during the terminal phase of deep learning training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08186/) (2020)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)

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

- [TrackCraft3R: Repurposing Video Diffusion Transformers for Dense 3D Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12587/) (2026)
- [Which Pretraining Paradigm Better Serves Spatial Intelligence? An Empirical Comparison of Vision-Language and Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28132/) (2026)
- [Dream.exe: Can Video Generation Models Dream Executable Robot Manipulation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04811/) (2026)
- [EagleDepth: Efficient Fine-Grained Depth Estimation via Pixel Diffusion Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04554/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing video depth estimation faces a fundamental trade-off: generative models suffer from stochastic geometric hallucinations and scale drift, while discriminative models demand massive labeled datasets to resolve semantic ambiguities. To break this impasse, we present DVD, the first framework to deterministically adapt pre-trained video diffusion models into single-pass depth regressors. Specifically, DVD features three core designs: (i) repurposing the diffusion timestep as a structural anchor to balance global stability with high-frequency details; (ii) latent manifold rectification (LMR) to mitigate regression-induced over-smoothing, enforcing differential constraints to restore sharp boundaries and coherent motion; and (iii) global affine coherence, an inherent property bounding inter-window divergence, which enables seamless long-video inference without requiring complex temporal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVD achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across benchmarks. Furthermore, DVD successfully unlocks the profound geometric priors implicit in video foundation models using 163x less task-specific data than leading baselines. Notably, we fully release our pipeline, providing the whole training suite for SOTA video depth estimation to benefit the open-source community.