Author name cluster

Willi Menapace

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8 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DenseDPO: Fine-Grained Temporal Preference Optimization for Video Diffusion Models

Ziyi Wu
Anil Kag
Ivan Skorokhodov
Willi Menapace
Ashkan Mirzaei
Igor Gilitschenski
Sergey Tulyakov
Aliaksandr Siarohin

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently been applied as a post‑training technique for text-to-video diffusion models. To obtain training data, annotators are asked to provide preferences between two videos generated from independent noise. However, this approach prohibits fine-grained comparisons, and we point out that it biases the annotators towards low-motion clips as they often contain fewer visual artifacts. In this work, we introduce DenseDPO, a method that addresses these shortcomings by making three contributions. First, we create each video pair for DPO by denoising corrupted copies of a ground truth video. This results in aligned pairs with similar motion structures while differing in local details, effectively neutralizing the motion bias. Second, we leverage the resulting temporal alignment to label preferences on short segments rather than entire clips, yielding a denser and more precise learning signal. With only one‑third of the labeled data, DenseDPO greatly improves motion generation over vanilla DPO, while matching it in text alignment, visual quality, and temporal consistency. Finally, we show that DenseDPO unlocks automatic preference annotation using off-the-shelf Vision Language Models (VLMs): GPT accurately predicts segment-level preferences similar to task-specifically fine-tuned video reward models, and DenseDPO trained on these labels achieves performance close to using human labels.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Fused View-Time Attention and Feedforward Reconstruction for 4D Scene Generation

Chaoyang Wang
Ashkan Mirzaei
Vidit Goel
Willi Menapace
Aliaksandr Siarohin
Michael Vasilkovsky
Ivan Skorokhodov
Vladislav Shakhrai

We propose the first framework capable of computing a 4D spatio-temporal grid of video frames and 3D Gaussian particles for each time step using a feed-forward architecture. Our architecture has two main components, a 4D video model and a 4D reconstruction model. In the first part, we analyze current 4D video diffusion architectures that perform spatial and temporal attention either sequentially or in parallel within a two-stream design. We highlight the limitations of existing approaches and introduce a novel fused architecture that performs spatial and temporal attention within a single layer. The key to our method is a sparse attention pattern, where tokens attend to others in the same frame, at the same timestamp, or from the same viewpoint. In the second part, we extend existing 3D reconstruction algorithms by introducing a Gaussian head, a camera token replacement algorithm, and additional dynamic layers and training. Overall, we establish a new state of the art for 4D generation, improving both visual quality and reconstruction capability.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Improving Progressive Generation with Decomposable Flow Matching

Moayed Haji-Ali
Willi Menapace
Ivan Skorokhodov
Arpit Sahni
Sergey Tulyakov
Vicente Ordonez
Aliaksandr Siarohin

Generating high-dimensional visual modalities is a computationally intensive task. A common solution is progressive generation, where the outputs are synthesized in a coarse-to-fine spectral autoregressive manner. While diffusion models benefit from the coarse-to-fine nature of denoising, explicit multi-stage architectures are rarely adopted. These architectures have increased the complexity of the overall approach, introducing the need for a custom diffusion formulation, decomposition-dependent stage transitions, ad-hoc samplers, or a model cascade. Our contribution, Decomposable Flow Matching (DFM), is a simple and effective framework for the progressive generation of visual media. DFM applies Flow Matching independently at each level of a user-defined multi-scale representation (such as Laplacian pyramid). As shown by our experiments, our approach improves visual quality for both images and videos, featuring superior results compared to prior multistage frameworks. On Imagenet-1k 512px, DFM achieves 35. 2% improvements in Frechet DINOv2 Distance (FDD) scores over the base architecture and 26. 4% over the best-performing baseline, under the same training compute. When applied to finetuning of large models, such as FLUX, DFM shows faster convergence speed to the training distribution. Crucially, all these advantages are achieved with a single model, architectural simplicity, and minimal modifications to existing training pipelines.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Improving the Diffusability of Autoencoders

Ivan Skorokhodov
Sharath Girish
Benran Hu 0001
Willi Menapace
Yanyu Li
Rameen Abdal
Sergey Tulyakov
Aliaksandr Siarohin

Latent diffusion models have emerged as the leading approach for generating high-quality images and videos, utilizing compressed latent representations to reduce the computational burden of the diffusion process. While recent advancements have primarily focused on scaling diffusion backbones and improving autoencoder reconstruction quality, the interaction between these components has received comparatively less attention. In this work, we perform a spectral analysis of modern autoencoders and identify inordinate high-frequency components in their latent spaces, which are especially pronounced in the autoencoders with a large bottleneck channel size. We hypothesize that this high-frequency component interferes with the coarse-to-fine nature of the diffusion synthesis process and hinders the generation quality. To mitigate the issue, we propose scale equivariance: a simple regularization strategy that aligns latent and RGB spaces across frequencies by enforcing scale equivariance in the decoder. It requires minimal code changes and only up to $20$K autoencoder fine-tuning steps, yet significantly improves generation quality, reducing FID by 19% for image generation on ImageNet-1K 256x256 and FVD by at least 44% for video generation on Kinetics-700 17x256x256. The source code is available at https: //github. com/snap-research/diffusability.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

VD3D: Taming Large Video Diffusion Transformers for 3D Camera Control

Sherwin Bahmani
Ivan Skorokhodov
Aliaksandr Siarohin
Willi Menapace
Guocheng Qian
Michael Vasilkovsky
Hsin-Ying Lee 0001
Chaoyang Wang 0001

Modern text-to-video synthesis models demonstrate coherent, photorealistic generation of complex videos from a text description. However, most existing models lack fine-grained control over camera movement, which is critical for downstream applications related to content creation, visual effects, and 3D vision. Recently, new methods demonstrate the ability to generate videos with controllable camera poses---these techniques leverage pre-trained U-Net-based diffusion models that explicitly disentangle spatial and temporal generation. Still, no existing approach enables camera control for new, transformer-based video diffusion models that process spatial and temporal information jointly. Here, we propose to tame video transformers for 3D camera control using a ControlNet-like conditioning mechanism that incorporates spatiotemporal camera embeddings based on Plucker coordinates. The approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance for controllable video generation after fine-tuning on the RealEstate10K dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to enable camera control for transformer-based video diffusion models.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

4Real: Towards Photorealistic 4D Scene Generation via Video Diffusion Models

Heng Yu
Chaoyang Wang
Peiye Zhuang
Willi Menapace
Aliaksandr Siarohin
Junli Cao
László A. Jeni
Sergey Tulyakov

Existing dynamic scene generation methods mostly rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained 3D generative models, which are typically fine-tuned on synthetic object datasets. As a result, the generated scenes are often object-centric and lack photorealism. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel pipeline designed for photorealistic text-to-4D scene generation, discarding the dependency on multi-view generative models and instead fully utilizing video generative models trained on diverse real-world datasets. Our method begins by generating a reference video using the video generation model. We then learn the canonical 3D representation of the video using a freeze-time video, delicately generated from the reference video. To handle inconsistencies in the freeze-time video, we jointly learn a per-frame deformation to model these imperfections. We then learn the temporal deformation based on the canonical representation to capture dynamic interactions in the reference video. The pipeline facilitates the generation of dynamic scenes with enhanced photorealism and structural integrity, viewable from multiple perspectives, thereby setting a new standard in 4D scene generation.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

AsCAN: Asymmetric Convolution-Attention Networks for Efficient Recognition and Generation

Anil Kag
Huseyin Coskun
Jierun Chen
Junli Cao
Willi Menapace
Aliaksandr Siarohin
Sergey Tulyakov
Jian Ren

Neural network architecture design requires making many crucial decisions. The common desiderata is that similar decisions, with little modifications, can be reused in a variety of tasks and applications. To satisfy that, architectures must provide promising latency and performance trade-offs, support a variety of tasks, scale efficiently with respect to the amounts of data and compute, leverage available data from other tasks, and efficiently support various hardware. To this end, we introduce AsCAN---a hybrid architecture, combining both convolutional and transformer blocks. We revisit the key design principles of hybrid architectures and propose a simple and effective \emph{asymmetric} architecture, where the distribution of convolutional and transformer blocks is \emph{asymmetric}, containing more convolutional blocks in the earlier stages, followed by more transformer blocks in later stages. AsCAN supports a variety of tasks: recognition, segmentation, class-conditional image generation, and features a superior trade-off between performance and latency. We then scale the same architecture to solve a large-scale text-to-image task and show state-of-the-art performance compared to the most recent public and commercial models. Notably, without performing any optimization of inference time our model shows faster execution, even when compared to works that do such optimization, highlighting the advantages and the value of our approach.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

SF-V: Single Forward Video Generation Model

Zhixing Zhang
Yanyu Li
Yushu Wu
Yanwu Xu
Anil Kag
Ivan Skorokhodov
Willi Menapace
Aliaksandr Siarohin

Diffusion-based video generation models have demonstrated remarkable success in obtaining high-fidelity videos through the iterative denoising process. However, these models require multiple denoising steps during sampling, resulting in high computational costs. In this work, we propose a novel approach to obtain single-step video generation models by leveraging adversarial training to fine-tune pre-trained video diffusion models. We show that, through the adversarial training, the multi-steps video diffusion model, i. e. , Stable Video Diffusion (SVD), can be trained to perform single forward pass to synthesize high-quality videos, capturing both temporal and spatial dependencies in the video data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive generation quality of synthesized videos with significantly reduced computational overhead for the denoising process (i. e. , around $23\times$ speedup compared with SVD and $6\times$ speedup compared with existing works, with even better generation quality), paving the way for real-time video synthesis and editing.

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