Bridging Event Streams and DiT: Event-Guided Video Frame Interpolation
Authors: Guixu Lin, Yuyang Yu, Xiang Ji, Linyao Chen, Zhengwei Yin, Mengshun Hu, Mingdeng Cao, Shengfeng He, +1 more
Organizations: The University of Tokyo · South China University of Technology · Wuhan University · Singapore Management University
Abstract
Latent diffusion models have recently advanced video frame interpolation by synthesizing intermediate frames between input images. However, handling large temporal gaps and complex motion remains challenging, often resulting in motion blur, structural distortions, and temporal inconsistencies. Event cameras provide high-temporal-resolution motion cues that are well suited for bridging these gaps and improving interpolation quality. To exploit this advantage without training an event-assisted model from scratch, we propose an adapter-based framework that incorporates event-derived cues into a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model with minimal architectural changes. Specifically, our method leverages Image Warped Events (IWEs) and bidirectional sparse optical flow to provide spatially and temporally aligned guidance during generation. By injecting these event-guided structural and motion cues into the diffusion process, our approach reduces interpolation artifacts and improves both reconstruction fidelity and temporal coherence. Experimental results on real and synthetic benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. The project page is at https://joseph-lin-tech.github.io/BridgeEventDiT-VFI/.
Event cameras excel at high-speed, low-power, and high-dynamic-range scene perception. However, as they fundamentally record only relative intensity changes rather than absolute intensity, the resulting data streams suffer from a significant loss of spatial information and static texture details. In this paper, we address this limitation by leveraging the generative prior of a pre-trained video diffusion model to reconstruct high-fidelity video frames from sparse event data. Specifically, we first establish a baseline model by directly applying event data as a condition to synthesize videos. Then, based on the physical correlation between the event stream and video frames, we further introduce the event-based inter-frame residual guidance to enhance the accuracy of video frame reconstruction. Furthermore, we extend our method to video frame interpolation and prediction in a zero-shot manner by modulating the reverse diffusion sampling process, thereby creating a unified event-to-frame reconstruction framework. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous reconstruction approaches on most quantitative metrics and achieves superior qualitative results, while achieving competitive zero-shot performance compared with dedicated methods explicitly trained for interpolation and prediction tasks. We also refer the reviewers to the video demo contained in the supplementary material for video results. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/CS-GangXu/UniE2F.
Recovering high-quality video from sparse event streams is a challenging task. Regression methods often blur textures, while existing generative models struggle with long-term stability. We propose LongE2V, a novel approach that leverages pre-trained video diffusion priors to jointly handle event-based video reconstruction, prediction, and frame interpolation. By fine-tuning a foundational video model, our approach achieves high data efficiency and superior perceptual quality. We introduce Autoregressive Unrolling and Adaptive Context Switching to mitigate temporal drift in extremely long sequences. We also propose Reencoding Alignment with Cross Residual Correction to ensure precise bidirectional consistency during frame interpolation. Furthermore, Event Voxel Density Augmentation ensures robustness across varying sensor resolutions. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that LongE2V outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all three tasks, exhibiting exceptional temporal coherence and zero-shot generalization. Project page: https://cdfan0627.github.io/LongE2V-page/
We propose Symmetric Nonlinear Motion-guided Generative Video Frame Interpolation (SNM-VFI), a training-free framework for motion-controllable generative video frame interpolation with pre-trained optical flow and video diffusion models. Unlike conventional diffusion-based VFI methods that synthesize intermediate frames from random noise, SNM-VFI guides the generative process with correspondence-aware frames produced by a symmetric nonlinear motion model. Specifically, we first utilize a pre-trained optical flow model to construct multi-frame nonlinear flow-based intermediate frames and confidence maps. These flow-guided frames are then encoded as latent priors to initialize and iteratively guide a pre-trained Video Diffusion model, enabling the diffusion model to preserve dense motion correspondence while improving perceptual realism. To further enhance output quality, we employ confidence maps to fuse structurally reliable flow-based predictions with diffusion-generated details in uncertain regions such as occlusions and object boundaries. Extensive evaluations on challenging benchmarks, including DAVIS, Sintel, and KITTI, demonstrate that SNM-VFI achieves strong perceptual quality, competitive reconstruction accuracy, and robust temporal coherence across diverse motion scenarios.