Audio-driven video generation (A2V) has achieved promising progress in synthesizing temporally coherent and audio-visually aligned videos, yet its inference remains expensive due to the iterative denoising process of diffusion models. Existing caching methods mainly exploit temporal redundancy in visual features while overlooking the cross-modal alignment of A2V, where audio drives visual generation with highly non-uniform temporal importance. In this paper, we identify two levels of misalignment in existing A2V caching methods: temporal-semantic and computation-storage misalignment. To address them, we propose EchoCache, an energy-guided cross-modal caching framework for efficient A2V generation. EchoCache leverages audio time-frequency energy as a saliency anchor to guide latent-level cache updates and further introduces a dynamic timestep-latent caching mechanism with quantized cache management for joint efficiency and memory optimization. Extensive experiments on mainstream A2V models show that EchoCache consistently improves the latency-quality trade-off while preserving generation quality and audio-visual consistency. In particular, on Wan2.2-S2V over the EMTD benchmark, EchoCache achieves a 2.46x speedup with the best overall performance. Code is available at https://github.com/IF-LAB-PKU/EchoCache.
Video-to-audio (V2A) generation extends image-to-audio generation (I2A) by introducing consecutive frames that provide essential temporal cues for audio synthesis. However, existing conditional diffusion-based V2A methods typically enhance visual conditioning with additional audio-visual supervision, acoustic structure prediction, or reasoning from large multimodal models, requiring extra networks or strong inductive biases. Inspired by recent advances in visual representation learning, we introduce TD-V2A, which leverages temporal differences (TD) as the key representation that distinguishes V2A from I2A, enriching visual conditioning with minimal architectural modification. We first investigate TD at both the frame and feature levels to identify the most effective representation level at which TD complements visual representations. Based on these findings, we develop a hierarchically continual learning strategy and an annealed temporal differences guidance method to progressively learn and exploit TD information during diffusion training and sampling process, respectively. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that effectively exploiting TD through our proposed framework significantly improves end-to-end V2A generation quality, even outperforming dedicated V2A representations such as contrastive audio-visual pretraining.
Autoregressive video generation paradigms offer theoretical promise for long video synthesis, yet their practical deployment is hindered by the computational burden of sequential iterative denoising. While cache reuse strategies can accelerate generation by skipping redundant denoising steps, existing methods rely on coarse-grained chunk-level skipping that fails to capture fine-grained pixel dynamics. This oversight is critical: pixels with high motion require more denoising steps to prevent error accumulation, while static pixels tolerate aggressive skipping. We formalize this insight theoretically by linking cache errors to residual instability, and propose MotionCache, a motion-aware cache framework that exploits inter-frame differences as a lightweight proxy for pixel-level motion characteristics. MotionCache employs a coarse-to-fine strategy: an initial warm-up phase establishes semantic coherence, followed by motion-weighted cache reuse that dynamically adjusts update frequencies per token. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models like SkyReels-V2 and MAGI-1 demonstrate that MotionCache achieves significant speedups of 6.28× and 1.64× respectively, while effectively preserving generation quality (VBench: 1%↓ and 0.01%↓ respectively). The code is available at https://github.com/ywlq/MotionCache.
Video-to-audio (V2A) generation faces significant challenges in achieving precise temporal synchronization and high perceptual quality due to the complex, ambiguous relationship between visual and auditory cues. Existing methods typically compress video inputs into single feature representations, leading to significant loss of temporal dynamics and fine-grained visual information. These approaches also rely on reconstruction-based training objectives that poorly correlate with human perceptual judgments of audio quality and appropriateness. We propose HarmoniDPO, a novel framework that integrates preference-based optimization into diffusion-based V2A generation to address these limitations. (1) Our approach leverages a dual video representation: combining global context with frame-wise features to preserve temporal dynamics and semantic detail. (2) Inspired by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), HarmoniDPO employs online Direct Preference Optimization (online-DPO) to fine-tune a diffusion-based V2A model from preference judgments, enhancing perceptual quality and alignment. (3) Additionally, we introduce Dual-scale Diffusion Search (DDS), a test time scaling algorithm that adaptively optimizes output fidelity during inference. Experiments demonstrate that HarmoniDPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods in audio-video synchronization and subjective audio quality, offering a robust solution for generating realistic, human-preferred audio from video.