# Causal-rCM: A Unified Teacher-Forcing and Self-Forcing Open Recipe for Autoregressive Diffusion Distillation in Streaming Video Generation and Interactive World Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25473 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25473/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video-generation world models and simulators, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 79 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- World models / [Video-generation world models and simulators](https://mlsanity.com/wm/video-generation-world-models-and-simulators/)
- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [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)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07524/) (2024)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [Simplified and Generalized Masked Diffusion for Discrete Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04329/) (2024)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13447/) (2025)
- [World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15922/) (2026)
- [Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02279/) (2023)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [Simple diffusion: End-to-end diffusion for high resolution images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11093/) (2023)
- [Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09573/) (2025)
- [Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05954/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Distillation in Iterative Generative Models for Improved Sampling Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02388/) (2021)
- [Causal World Modeling for Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21998/) (2026)
- [Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11081/) (2024)
- [MAGI-1: Autoregressive Video Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13211/) (2025)
- [LongLive: Real-time Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22622/) (2025)
- [Seedance 1.0: Exploring the Boundaries of Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09113/) (2025)
- [DeepSpeed Ulysses: System Optimizations for Enabling Training of Extreme Long Sequence Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14509/) (2023)
- [DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16117/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [AlayaWorld: Interactive Long-Horizon World Modeling -- Full Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18367/) (2026)
- [Context-Matched Distillation: Teacher Causality for Autoregressive Video Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13391/) (2026)
- [Vidu S1: A Real-Time Interactive Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03118/) (2026)
- [Visko Orbis 1.0: A Live Model for Real-Time Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26694/) (2026)
- [ForgeWM: Progressive Causal Training for Few-Step Action-Conditioned Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14022/) (2026)
- [EditStream: A Unified Autoregressive Framework for Interactive Video Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21424/) (2026)
- [Mask Forcing: Improving Autoregressive Video Diffusion Distillation via Dual-Noise Masking Rollout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09123/) (2026)
- [Salt++: Context-Aligned Post-Training for Few-Step Streaming Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36995/) (2026)
- [Vorch-Director: Interactive World Story Model via Noise-Aware Error Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05776/) (2026)
- [AuK Technical Report: An Open-Source Foundational Model for Speech Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08936/) (2026)
- [ActionSplice: In-Flight Action Editing for Interactive World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08230/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Streaming Video Diffusion Model: Context, Execution, and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22283/) (2026)
- [OneFixer: High-Quality and Consistent One-Step Autoregressive 3DGS Refinement for Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32175/) (2026)
- [UnStep: Training-Free Acceleration of Causal Video Diffusion with Fewer Steps Than Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32518/) (2026)
- [In-Flight KV Cache with Clean Anchors for Faster Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32540/) (2026)
- [WorldPlay2: Extending Real-Time Interactive World Models in Control and Horizon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35560/) (2026)
- [Compress to Remember: Learning Compact Memory via On-Policy Distillation for Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36364/) (2026)
- [Rollout-Marginal Distillation for Long-Horizon Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37925/) (2026)
- [LongTake: Learning to Sustain Dynamics in Long-Horizon Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38562/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Autoregressive Video Generation via Representation Adversarial Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40037/) (2026)
- [Conditional Residual Prediction: Improving Autoregressive Video Diffusion without a Bidirectional Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11479/) (2026)
- [Few-Step Generation via Data-Space Iteration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12102/) (2026)
- [AgentGarten: Code Worlds for Evolving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12374/) (2026)
- [Adversarial Gradient Forcing for Robust Few-Step Autoregressive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14553/) (2026)
- [RepForcing: Representation-Space Initialization for Autoregressive Video Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20111/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autoregressive video diffusion with causal diffusion transformers has emerged as a major paradigm for real-time streaming video generation and action-conditioned interactive world models. In this work, we extend rCM, an advanced diffusion distillation framework, to autoregressive video diffusion. The core philosophy of rCM lies in the complementarity between forward and reverse divergences, represented by consistency models (CMs) and distribution matching distillation (DMD), respectively, in diffusion distillation. This philosophy naturally carries over to the autoregressive setting, where teacher-forcing (TF) provides an offline, forward-divergence causal training paradigm, while self-forcing (SF) corresponds to an on-policy, reverse-divergence refinement. Our contributions are: (1) through extensive experiments, we show that teacher-forcing CM is currently the best complement to self-forcing DMD as an initialization strategy (2) we present the first implementation of teacher-forcing-based continuous-time CMs (e.g., sCM/MeanFlow) for autoregressive video diffusion, enabled by our custom-mask FlashAttention-2 JVP kernel, achieving 10× faster convergence compared to discrete-time CMs (dCMs) (3) we introduce Causal-rCM, a leading, unified, and scalable algorithm-infrastructure open recipe for diffusion distillation and causal training (4) we achieve state-of-the-art streaming video generation performance in both frame-wise and chunk-wise settings, using only synthetic data for training. Notably, our distilled 2-step causal Wan2.1-1.3B model achieves a VBench-T2V score of 84.63 with only 1 or 2 sampling steps. We further apply Causal-rCM to Cosmos 3, an advanced omnimodal world foundation model for physical AI with action-conditioned generation capability, enabling an interactive world model.