# Generative Video Compression Based on Hierarchical Referencing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11618 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11618/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion for compression and wireless, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 39 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion for compression and wireless](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-for-compression-and-wireless/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09965/) (2020)
- [ELIC: Efficient Learned Image Compression with Unevenly Grouped Space-Channel Contextual Adaptive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10886/) (2022)
- [Deep Contextual Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15047/) (2021)
- [Neural Video Compression with Diverse Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14402/) (2023)
- [Temporal Context Mining for Learned Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13850/) (2021)
- [Learning for Video Compression with Hierarchical Quality and Recurrent Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01966/) (2020)
- [Towards Practical Real-Time Neural Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20762/) (2025)
- [Gated Slot Attention for Efficient Linear-Time Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07146/) (2024)
- [Perceptual Learned Video Compression with Recurrent Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03082/) (2021)
- [FloLPIPS: A Bespoke Video Quality Metric for Frame Interpoation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08119/) (2022)
- [Neural Video Compression using GANs for Detail Synthesis and Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12038/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Rate-Distortion Optimized Learned Hierarchical Bi-Directional Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09529/) (2021)
- [Generative Latent Coding for Ultra-Low Bitrate Image and Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16177/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-based Perceptual Neural Video Compression with Temporal Diffusion Information Reuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13528/) (2025)
- [Bi-Directional Deep Contextual Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08604/) (2024)
- [B-CANF: Adaptive B-frame Coding with Conditional Augmented Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01769/) (2022)
- [Generative Neural Video Compression via Video Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05016/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical B-frame Video Coding Using Two-Layer CANF without Motion Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02690/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based generative video compression has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve perceptual quality, where latent frames are required to be encoded efficiently while serving as denoising conditions. However, existing methods neither carefully design reference and quality structures during latent coding nor account for the impact of frame-level quality variation on denoising procedure, which limits coding efficiency and aggravates artifact propagation during generative reconstruction. In this paper, we propose GVCHR, Generative Video Compression based on Hierarchical Referencing. The key idea is to organize latent frames hierarchically, where the selected high-quality references benefit both latent coding and generative reconstruction. In latent coding, GVCHR couples a hierarchical reference structure with a hierarchical quality structure, assigning more bits to lower-layer frames that are reused more frequently as references. Built on this design, we introduce Hierarchical Temporal Context Mining to exploits complementary short- and long-term temporal context for effective latent coding. In generative reconstruction, the coding-side hierarchy is incorporated into a Hierarchical Attentive Adapter which is attached to a video diffusion transformer. This adapter uses hierarchical attention to restrict each latent frame to attend only to the same- or lower-layer references, thereby reducing artifact propagation during denoising. Experiments validate GVCHR on multiple benchmarks. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, GVCHR achieves 50.5% and 54.0% BD-rate gains in terms of LPIPS and DISTS, respectively, while also delivering clearly improved visual quality.