# Video Generation Models are General-Purpose Vision Learners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 74 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15595/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [VGI-Bench: Probing Visual Intelligence in Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19583/) (2026)
- [Magpie: Real-Time World Renderer for Interactive Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27168/) (2026)
- [SUV: Future Scene Understanding as Video Generation for End-to-End Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03084/) (2026)
- [ACE-Ego-Hand: Repurposing Video Diffusion Models for Occlusion-Robust Egocentric 3D Hand Motion Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20308/) (2026)
- [Uncovering Understanding-Generation Synergy in Native Unified Multimodal Models: From Representation, Task to System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01607/) (2026)
- [MachEmbodied-U0: Unified Understanding and Generation Model for Embodied Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25627/) (2026)
- [Beyond Pixels: From Video Priors to 4D Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10744/) (2026)
- [Diffuse2Seg: Diffusion Models Can Segment Anything Without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06491/) (2026)
- [Generalist Open-World Temporal Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06823/) (2026)
- [Latent evolving World Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27455/) (2026)
- [Learning via Self-Consistency for Diffusion-based Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36826/) (2026)
- [Emergent Multi-View Geometry Through Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39227/) (2026)
- [XGenAct: Geometry-Enhanced World Action Models through Cross-Task Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03516/) (2026)
- [BridgeWAM: Bridging Video and Action Experts via Latent Bridge Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14746/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Driven by next-token prediction, NLP shifted from task-specific models into powerful generalist foundation models. What, then, is the equivalent catalyst needed to achieve a general-purpose model in computer vision? In this paper, we contend that large-scale text-to-video generation serves as a strong pre-training paradigm for computer vision, providing the necessary spatiotemporal priors, vision-language alignment, and scalability required for general visual intelligence. We introduce GenCeption, which leverages a pre-trained video generative diffusion backbone to define a feed-forward perception model, capable of performing various vision tasks steered by text instructions. Empirical results demonstrate that GenCeption achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse suite of tasks, including depth, surface normal, and camera pose estimation, expression-referring segmentation, and 3D keypoint prediction, often matching or surpassing specialized models (e.g. DepthAnything3, SAM3, D4RT, VGGT-Omega, Sapiens, David, Genmo, and Lotus-2). Furthermore, the video generative pretrained backbone outperforms alternative pretraining paradigms (e.g., V-JEPA, and Video MAE) under comparable settings. Importantly, GenCeption exhibits preliminary data and model scaling properties along with exceptional data efficiency, where it achieves comparable performance with leading models like D4RT and VGGT-Omega with 7 to 500 less training data. Finally, GenCeption also exhibits intriguing emergent behaviors: a model trained exclusively on synthetic human videos generalizes to real-world footage and out-of-distribution object categories (e.g., animals and robots). These findings suggest that video generation is not merely a synthesis tool, but a foundational path toward generalist vision intelligence for the physical world. Project page: https://genception.github.io