cs.CVApr 17, 2026

Efficient Video Diffusion Models: Advancements and Challenges

Authors: Shitong Shao, Lichen Bai, Pengfei Wan, James Kwok, Zeke Xie

Organizations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China · Kling Team, Kuaishou Technology, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Abstract

Video diffusion models have rapidly become the dominant paradigm for high-fidelity generative video synthesis, but their practical deployment remains constrained by severe inference costs. Compared with image generation, video synthesis compounds computation across spatial-temporal token growth and iterative denoising, making attention and memory traffic major bottlenecks in real-world settings. This survey provides a systematic and deployment-oriented review of efficient video diffusion models. We propose a unified categorization that organizes existing methods into four classes of main paradigms, including step distillation, efficient attention, model compression, and cache/trajectory optimization. Building on this categorization, we respectively analyze algorithmic trends of these four paradigms and examine how different design choices target two core objectives: reducing the number of function evaluations and minimizing per-step overhead. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions, including quality preservation under composite acceleration, hardware-software co-design, robust real-time long-horizon generation, and open infrastructure for standardized evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first comprehensive survey on efficient video diffusion models, offering researchers and engineers a structured overview of the field and its emerging research directions.

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