# TIDE: Trajectory-Informed Skill Distillation for Efficient Text-to-Video Prompt Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15098/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 18 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [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)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [EvalCrafter: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11440/) (2023)
- [VBench-2.0: Advancing Video Generation Benchmark Suite for Intrinsic Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21755/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Prompts for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09611/) (2022)
- [T2V-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14505/) (2024)
- [SANA-Video: Efficient Video Generation with Block Linear Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24695/) (2025)
- [Improving Text-to-Image Consistency via Automatic Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17804/) (2024)
- [PromptEnhancer: A Simple Approach to Enhance Text-to-Image Models via Chain-of-Thought Prompt Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04545/) (2025)
- [VISTA: A Test-Time Self-Improving Video Generation Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15831/) (2025)
- [VPO: Aligning Text-to-Video Generation Models with Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20491/) (2025)
- [Prompt-A-Video: Prompt Your Video Diffusion Model via Preference-Aligned LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15156/) (2024)
- [BeautifulPrompt: Towards Automatic Prompt Engineering for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06752/) (2023)
- [RAPO++: Cross-Stage Prompt Optimization for Text-to-Video Generation via Data Alignment and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20206/) (2025)
- [Guiding What Not to Generate: Automated Negative Prompting for Text-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07702/) (2025)
- [POS: A Prompts Optimization Suite for Augmenting Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00949/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-video (T2V) models are highly sensitive to prompt specificity, while iterative prompt optimization typically improves generation quality only through repeated video generation and vision-language model evaluation at inference time. We propose TIDE, a framework that distills this costly search process into an interpretable and reusable prompt-rewriting Skill. TIDE formulates prompt rewriting as a set of source-conditioned rule modules, each targeting a distinct semantic dimension. Once distilled, the frozen Skill activates the relevant rules and generates both positive and negative prompts in a single LLM call, followed by only one T2V generation, without test-time visual search or backbone fine-tuning. Evolved using only 100 prompts over 14 hours, TIDE achieves prompt-optimization performance comparable to computationally expensive search-based methods. Moreover, when transferred to previously unseen video-generation models, TIDE outperforms existing approaches specifically designed or trained for those models. Code is available at https://github.com/xiningin/TIDE_T2V.