# Foveated Diffusion: Efficient Spatially Adaptive Image and Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23491 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23491/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 71 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

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

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

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [An Introduction to Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02691/) (2019)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Genie: Generative Interactive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15391/) (2024)
- [Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02150/) (2019)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05954/) (2024)
- [Diffusion for World Modeling: Visual Details Matter in Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12399/) (2024)

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

- [Spatial Transport of Integration Error in Generative ODEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16361/) (2026)
- [MOSAIK: Multi-Patch Content-Aware Spatial Allocation of Image Tokens for Efficient Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05450/) (2026)
- [Level-of-Token Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05816/) (2026)
- [FoveaVLA: Foveation Actions Replace the Wrist Camera in VLAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20064/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion and flow matching models have unlocked unprecedented capabilities for creative content creation, such as interactive image and streaming video generation. The growing demand for higher resolutions, frame rates, and context lengths, however, makes efficient generation increasingly challenging, as computational complexity grows quadratically with the number of generated tokens. Our work seeks to optimize the efficiency of the generation process in settings where the user's gaze location is known or can be estimated, for example, by using eye tracking. In these settings, we leverage the eccentricity-dependent acuity of human vision: while a user perceives very high-resolution visual information in a small region around their gaze location (the foveal region), the ability to resolve detail quickly degrades in the periphery of the visual field. Our approach starts with a mask modeling the foveated resolution to allocate tokens non-uniformly, assigning higher token density to foveal regions and lower density to peripheral regions. An image or video is generated in a mixed-resolution token setting, yielding results perceptually indistinguishable from full-resolution generation, while drastically reducing the token count and generation time. To this end, we develop a principled mechanism for constructing mixed-resolution tokens directly from high-resolution data, allowing a foveated diffusion model to be post-trained from an existing base model while maintaining content consistency across resolutions. We validate our approach through extensive analysis and a carefully designed user study, demonstrating the efficacy of foveation as a practical and scalable axis for efficient generation.