# Motion-Adaptive Temporal Attention for Lightweight Video Generation with Stable Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17398 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17398/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 15 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [DragAnything: Motion Control for Anything using Entity Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07420/) (2024)
- [Motion-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Controllable Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14404/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a motion-adaptive temporal attention mechanism for parameter-efficient video generation built upon frozen Stable Diffusion models. Rather than treating all video content uniformly, our method dynamically adjusts temporal attention receptive fields based on estimated motion content: high-motion sequences attend locally across frames to preserve rapidly changing details, while low-motion sequences attend globally to enforce scene consistency. We inject lightweight temporal attention modules into all UNet transformer blocks via a cascaded strategy -- global attention in down-sampling and middle blocks for semantic stabilization, motion-adaptive attention in up-sampling blocks for fine-grained refinement. Combined with temporally correlated noise initialization and motion-aware gating, the system adds only 25.8M trainable parameters (2.9% of the base UNet) while achieving competitive results on WebVid validation when trained on 100K videos. We demonstrate that the standard denoising objective alone provides sufficient implicit temporal regularization, outperforming approaches that add explicit temporal consistency losses. Our ablation studies reveal a clear trade-off between noise correlation and motion amplitude, providing a practical inference-time control for diverse generation behaviors.