# MotionCraft: Latent World Modeling with Sparse Attention for Visual Upscaling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08553 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08553/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 7 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05301/) (2025)
- [FlashVSR: Towards Real-Time Diffusion-Based Streaming Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12747/) (2025)
- [FlashVideo: Flowing Fidelity to Detail for Efficient High-Resolution Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05179/) (2025)
- [DOVE: Efficient One-Step Diffusion Model for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16239/) (2025)
- [InfVSR: Toward Consistency-Driven Streaming Generative Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00948/) (2025)
- [SimpleGVR: A Simple Baseline for Latent-Cascaded Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19838/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Video Super-Resolution: Towards Diffusion-Based Methods without Motion Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03355/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [HGSQ: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for Real-Time Aerial Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13306/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to recover high-fidelity high-resolution videos from low-resolution inputs and is central to applications ranging from mobile capture to streaming and archival restoration. Existing approaches trade off among local-detail fidelity, long-range spatio-temporal modeling, perceptual realism, and efficiency: convolutional alignment techniques preserve local structure but suffer when motion is large or degradations are complex; transformer-based methods capture long-range dependencies yet require architectural or algorithmic adaptations to remain computationally feasible; and recent latent or diffusion-based generators synthesize rich texture but require specialized temporal constraints to maintain coherence. We present MotionCraft, a controllable VSR framework that formulates restoration as motion-aware latent state prediction inspired by world models and integrates adaptive sparse attention with an explicit user-accessible control interface. MotionCraft combines robust motion fusion, a Latent World Transformer that balances locality and targeted non-local interactions, and a compact conditional decoder to deliver temporally consistent, high-quality reconstructions under streaming constraints. Empirical evaluations show that MotionCraft achieves strong reconstruction and perceptual performance while enabling predictable trade-offs between temporal smoothness and reconstruction fidelity.