mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

EFlow: Fast Few-Step Video Generator Training from Scratch via Efficient Solution Flow

arXiv 2603.27086 ↗First posted 28 Mar 2026cs.CVcited by 2

On the map: Diffusion models → Video generation

Abstract (arXiv)

Scaling video diffusion transformers is fundamentally bottlenecked by two compounding costs: the expensive quadratic complexity of attention per step, and the iterative sampling steps. In this work, we propose EFlow, an efficient few-step training framework, that tackles these bottlenecks simultaneously. To reduce sampling steps, we build on a solution-flow objective that learns a function mapping a noised state at time t to time s. Making this formulation computationally feasible and high-quality at video scale, however, demands two complementary innovations. First, we propose Gated Local-Global Attention, a token-droppable hybrid block which is efficient, expressive, and remains highly stable under aggressive random token-dropping, substantially reducing per-step compute. Second, we develop an efficient few-step training recipe. We propose Path-Drop Guided training to replace the expensive guidance target with a computationally cheap, weak path. Furthermore, we augment this with a Mean-Velocity Additivity regularizer to ensure high fidelity at extremely low step counts. Together, our EFlow enables a practical from-scratch training pipeline, achieving up to 2.5x higher training throughput over standard solution-flow, and 45.3x lower inference latency than standard iterative models with competitive performance on Kinetics and large-scale text-to-video datasets.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 52 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2026.

Builds on

52 of 56 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026S2DiT: Sandwich Diffusion Transformer for Mobile Streaming Video Generation19 Jan
  2. 2025SANA-Video: Efficient Video Generation with Block Linear Diffusion Transformer29 Sep
  3. 2025SLA: Beyond Sparsity in Diffusion Transformers via Fine-Tunable Sparse-Linear Attention28 Sep
  4. 2025VSA: Faster Video Diffusion with Trainable Sparse Attention19 May
  5. 2025Training-free and Adaptive Sparse Attention for Efficient Long Video Generation28 Feb
  6. 2025Fast Video Generation with Sliding Tile Attention6 Feb
  7. 2025Sparse VideoGen: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers with Spatial-Temporal Sparsity3 Feb
  8. 2024Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling8 Oct
  9. 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer12 Aug
  10. 2024SF-V: Single Forward Video Generation Model6 Jun
  11. 2024DiG: Scalable and Efficient Diffusion Models with Gated Linear Attention28 May
  12. 2023VidToMe: Video Token Merging for Zero-Shot Video Editing17 Dec

Other references · 40

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  2. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  3. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  4. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  5. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  6. 2021RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embeddingcited by 4,703
  7. 2022FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awarenesscited by 3,673
  8. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,413
  9. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  10. 2023FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioningcited by 2,598
  11. 2023Consistency Modelscited by 1,822
  12. 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,822
28 more
  1. 2018Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challengescited by 1,234
  2. 2022Token Merging: Your ViT But Fastercited by 1,021
  3. 2023One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillationcited by 1,019
  4. 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulatorscited by 881
  5. 2024Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesiscited by 684
  6. 2024Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for Allcited by 652
  7. 2025Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modelingcited by 561
  8. 2024Gated Delta Networks: Improving Mamba2 with Delta Rulecited by 532
  9. 2025Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attentioncited by 407
  10. 2024SANA: Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Linear Diffusion Transformerscited by 340
  11. 2019A Short Note on the Kinetics-700 Human Action Datasetcited by 310
  12. 2024Guiding a Diffusion Model with a Bad Version of Itselfcited by 299
  13. 2024Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Modelscited by 283
  14. 2023MDTv2: Masked Diffusion Transformer is a Strong Image Synthesizercited by 262
  15. 2023Token Merging for Fast Stable Diffusioncited by 224
  16. 2024Score identity Distillation: Exponentially Fast Distillation of Pretrained Diffusion Models for One-Step Generationcited by 214
  17. 2025Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecturecited by 196
  18. 2023Fast Training of Diffusion Models with Masked Transformerscited by 176
  19. 2025Large Scale Diffusion Distillation via Score-Regularized Continuous-Time Consistencycited by 86
  20. 2024vid-TLDR: Training Free Token merging for Light-weight Video Transformercited by 41
  21. 2024Breaking the Low-Rank Dilemma of Linear Attentioncited by 31
  22. 2024DDMI: Domain-Agnostic Latent Diffusion Models for Synthesizing High-Quality Implicit Neural Representationscited by 16
  23. 2025H3AE: High Compression, High Speed, and High Quality AutoEncoder for Video Diffusion Modelscited by 13
  24. 2025SoFlow: Solution Flow Models for One-Step Generative Modelingcited by 13
  25. 2024Constant Acceleration Flowcited by 11
  26. 2025Sprint: Sparse-Dense Residual Fusion for Efficient Diffusion Transformerscited by 4
  27. 2026One Model, Many Budgets: Elastic Latent Interfaces for Diffusion Transformerscited by 4
  28. 2025Blockwise Flow Matching: Improving Flow Matching Models For Efficient High-Quality Generationcited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026RhymeFlow: Training-Free Acceleration for Video Generation with Asynchronous Denoising Flow Scheduling
  2. 2026Not All Tokens Need 40 Steps: Heterogeneous Step Allocation in Diffusion Transformers for Efficient Video Generation
  3. 2024Optical-Flow Guided Prompt Optimization for Coherent Video Generation
  4. 2026AnyFlow: Any-Step Video Diffusion Model with On-Policy Flow Map Distillation
  5. 2026Dynamic-in-Few-Step: Unifying Dynamic Computation and Few-Step Distillation for Efficient Video Generation
  6. 2025Training-Free Efficient Video Generation via Dynamic Token Carving
  7. 2026SPADE: An Input-Adaptive Sparse Attention Engine for Fast Video Diffusion Models Inference
  8. 2025Flowception: Temporally Expansive Flow Matching for Video Generation