Information Capacity of Generative Video Compression: Quantifying the Rate-Compute Exchange at Identical Quality

Codebook-driven generative compression uses a pretrained image or video generator as a zero-shot visual prior and transmits compact codebook indices to guide reconstruction at ultra-low bitrate. Current codecs tie each finite-rate correction to a fresh prior evaluation, so shortening the sampler also removes correction slots that carry target-dependent information. We propose GVCCTurbo, a BPP-driven scheduler that separates expensive prior refreshes from codebook corrections: after calibrating an atom-count operating point and skip-gap ratio once per protocol, it maps a target codebook-payload bitrate to a trajectory length and refresh period, making BPP a schedule input instead of a fixed consequence of sampler length. The same endpoint-prediction and finite-rate steering interface covers GVCC-style rectified-flow video and DDCM-style diffusion image compression, preserving zero-training deployment and compatibility with future distilled priors. Native 1080p curves position the complete zero-shot codec in the ultra-low-bitrate regime. In a controlled 720p Wan-GVCC study, the scheduler cuts prior evaluations from 20 to 9 for a $\sim\!44\%$ measured decoding-time reduction shared across the whole schedule family, at a small shared LPIPS cost on high-motion content; within that family, uniform refresh thinning (pure-skip) is a boundary point, and the BPP-aware interior point trades $2.9\%$ fewer codebook-payload bits for consistently higher PSNR at comparable LPIPS. These results support BPP-to-compute scheduling as a controllable extension of sampler-length tuning, without requiring the allocated point to dominate every boundary point.

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.