Dense-Prior-Guided Generative Video Compression

Recent generative video compression methods leverage powerful generative priors to achieve perceptually pleasing reconstructions. However, most existing approaches require additional training to adapt generative models to produce realistic reconstructions from compact representations. In this paper, we propose ZeroGVC, a zero-shot generative video compression framework that leverages pretrained autoregressive diffusion priors for low-delay video reconstruction. ZeroGVC encodes the first frame of each group of pictures (GOP) with an image codec and represents subsequent P-frames through Codebook-Guided Autoregressive Latent Compression. This design is motivated by our observation that the compression scheme of denoising diffusion codebook models is effective in few-step consistency sampling. By selecting compact combinations of reproducible codebook noise vectors, ZeroGVC steers the latent denoising trajectory toward the target P-frame while allowing the decoder to reproduce the same trajectory in only a few denoising steps. In addition, we design an optional bidirectional reference mode that mitigates error propagation by leveraging the next I-frame context without introducing any additional bitrate overhead. Extensive experiments on standard video compression benchmarks demonstrate that ZeroGVC achieves superior perceptual reconstruction quality at ultra-low bitrates without any additional training.

Diffusion models provide strong generative capabilities for video compression at ultra-low bitrates. Existing diffusion-based video codecs adapt base models originally developed for text-conditioned generation, whereas diffusion models designed and trained specifically for compression remain unexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce our Generative Video Codec (GenVC), built on a video diffusion model trained from scratch for compression. To our knowledge, this is the first compression-oriented video diffusion model. We realize this model directly in pixel space with a global-to-local hierarchy that recovers fine spatio-temporal details, enabling high-quality generative reconstruction from compressed representations. To accelerate inference, we distill the multi-step model into one step using distribution matching distillation (DMD). Applying DMD directly, however, drives the student toward motion-stalled reconstructions. We trace this to a teacher-side guidance failure: once student-induced perturbations leave the frozen teacher's training region, its guidance can become misleading, causing DMD updates to reinforce rather than correct the student drift. To break the resulting feedback loop, we propose Adaptive Score Distillation, which gates DMD updates according to their alignment with the ground-truth direction, enabling high-quality reconstruction with coherent motion. Experimental results show that GenVC achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality at ultra-low bitrates, with average bitrate savings of 62.5% at matched LPIPS and 71.3% at matched FID over GLVC. Unlike prior codecs that inherit billion-scale pretrained backbones, our diffusion model has only 478.0M parameters and decodes 1080p video in a single step at 15.1 fps on an A100 GPU.

Generative video compression (GVC) methods usually employ decoder-side diffusion models to denoise reconstructed signals based on generative priors. Besides, most of these methods perform denoising in latent space rather than directly in pixel domain. In this paper, we propose ResGVC, a residual coding framework for GVC that guides denoising toward original pictures by transmitting residual signals. ResGVC first encodes the original pictures within a learned video codec, and then decomposes the distortion between the codec reconstruction and the original pictures into a sequence of residual segments, where each residual segment is acquired at each denoising step. Residual segments can further be compressed by a novel residual codec with a diffusion transformer as an entropy model. Unlike prior methods, ResGVC introduces explicit source constraints throughout denoising rather than relying on decoder-side generation alone. The diffusion-based entropy model also enables more effective distribution modeling capability based on the powerful generative priors. Moreover, denoising directly in pixel space avoids the irreversible information loss caused by latent representation bottlenecks. Experimental results show that, compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, ResGVC achieves 63.7% and 83.8% BD-rate reductions in terms of LPIPS and PSNR, respectively, while also delivering superior visual quality.