SoL-Refiner: Speed-of-Light One-Step Refinement for High-Resolution Video
Organizations: NVIDIA
Abstract
High-resolution video generation is expensive, as its cost grows rapidly with the number of spatiotemporal tokens. A practical alternative first generates a lower-resolution video and then applies a refiner, but conventional multi-step refinement introduces a second sampling bottleneck. We present SoL-Refiner, a one-step video refiner that transforms low-resolution model outputs into 4K videos with a single denoising step. Our three-stage recipe combines high-resolution continual training, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and a final one-step distillation. We introduce Refiner-Bench, a video refinement benchmark constructed from the outputs of different video generators, and use a shared-input protocol to compare refiners at approximately 2K output resolution. At 2K, the one-step SoL-Refiner outperforms all external refiners on the VBench and UniPercept averages, while at it improves both metrics over the three-step LTX-2.3 Refiner. With the complete acceleration stack, SoL-Refiner achieves an speedup in refinement latency over the same baseline in our 2K latency setting.
Figures & tables
| Method | Eval. Res. | # Steps | VBench | |||||||
| SC | BC | MS | DD | AQ | IQ | AVG | ||||
| Resized Input | – | 0.91805 | 0.95261 | 0.98354 | 0.70000 | 0.60621 | 0.63158 | 0.79866 | 0.00000 | |
| LingBot Stage-2 Refiner | 8 | 0.91715 | 0.95354 | 0.98398 | 0.74000 | 0.57762 | 0.63792 | 0.80170 | 0.00304 | |
| LTX-2.3 Refiner | 3 | 0.93004 | 0.95354 | 0.98873 | 0.70000 | 0.59541 | 0.65553 | 0.80388 | 0.00522 | |
| LTX-2.0 Refiner | 3 | 0.93036 | 0.95909 | 0.98656 | 0.72000 | 0.60679 | 0.64497 | 0.80796 | 0.00930 | |
| SEEDVR2 | 1 | 0.91804 | 0.94783 | 0.97723 | 0.71333 | 0.60129 | 0.66337 | 0.80351 | 0.00485 | |
| Method | Eval. Res. | # Steps | UniPercept | |||
| IAA | IQA | ISTA | AVG | |||
| Resized Input | – | 59.3540 | 60.8943 | 42.0890 | 54.1124 | |
| LingBot Stage-2 Refiner | 8 | 58.9189 | 58.0827 | 42.1403 | 53.0473 | |
| LTX-2.3 Refiner | 3 | 61.2239 | 61.9438 | 45.2052 | 56.1243 | |
| LTX-2.0 Refiner | 3 | 60.5074 | 60.4902 | 42.3823 | 54.4600 | |
| SEEDVR2 | 1 | 62.5692 | 64.4827 | 43.4057 | 56.8192 | |
| Training Stage | VBench | UniPercept | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SC | BC | MS | DD | AQ | IQ | AVG | IAA | IQA | ISTA | AVG | |
| Stage 1: Continual (Multi-Step) | 0.92756 | 0.95361 | 0.98201 | 0.72000 | 0.60526 | 0.66484 | 0.80888 | 63.0807 | 64.5693 | 42.3359 | 56.6620 |
| Stage 2: Post-Training (Multi-Step) | 0.92988 | 0.94935 | 0.98027 | 0.72000 | 0.62344 | 0.69851 | 0.81691 | 66.7284 | 72.3977 | 44.8249 | 61.3170 |
| Stage 3: DMD-GAN (One-Step) | 0.92191 | 0.94591 | 0.98054 | 0.71333 | 0.60921 | 0.69196 | 0.81048 | 65.7322 | 70.6682 | 44.8445 | 60.4150 |
| Configuration | VBench | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SC | BC | MS | DD | AQ | IQ | AVG | |
| w/o regularization recipe | 0.94438 | 0.95297 | 0.98074 | 0.62667 | 0.64757 | 0.71044 | 0.81046 |
| w/o multiple reward models | 0.93553 | 0.94765 | 0.98443 | 0.70000 | 0.62616 | 0.69111 | 0.81415 |
| Ours | 0.92988 | 0.94935 | 0.98027 | 0.72000 | 0.62344 | 0.69851 | 0.81691 |
| Configuration | VBench | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SC | BC | MS | DD | AQ | IQ | AVG | |
| DMD-R | 0.91385 | 0.93886 | 0.97779 | 0.66000 | 0.61929 | 0.69608 | 0.80098 |
| RL then DMD | 0.92191 | 0.94591 | 0.98054 | 0.71333 | 0.60921 | 0.69196 | 0.81048 |
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Resolution | Configuration | GPU | VBench | Latency (s) | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SC | BC | MS | DD | AQ | IQ | AVG | 81 frames | 161 frames | |||
| Base (Multi-Step) | H100 | 0.9082 | 0.9364 | 0.9813 | 0.7067 | 0.5618 | 0.6713 | 0.7943 | 127.7 | 490 | |
| 2K | w/ Sol-Engine | H100 | 0.9092 | 0.9365 | 0.9813 | 0.7200 | 0.5550 | 0.6601 | 0.7937 | 53.7 | 164 |
| Base (Multi-Step) | H100 | 0.9037 | 0.9367 | 0.9806 | 0.7267 | 0.5547 | 0.6719 | 0.7957 | 927.6 | 5123 | |
| 4K | w/ Sol-Engine | H100 | 0.9043 | 0.9386 | 0.9817 | 0.7267 | 0.5511 | 0.6591 | 0.7936 | 284.8 | 1650 |
| Source Generator | Videos | Native Res. | Aligned Crop | Main Refiner Input |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WAN 2.1 1.3B | 50 | |||
| SANA-Video 2B | 50 | |||
| LTX-2 Stage 1 | 50 |
| Content Group | Videos | Main Visual Challenges |
|---|---|---|
| Human daily activity | 18 | Hands, object interaction, water, and reflections |
| Animals | 15 | Fur, articulated motion, fast motion, and water |
| Nature and landscape | 15 | Water, weather, foliage, and particles |
| Sports and dance | 15 | Fast articulated motion, hands, and fine body geometry |
| Cinematic portraits | 12 | Faces, skin, hair, hands, and low-light detail |
| Urban and architecture | 12 | Structural lines, repeated geometry, and reflections |
| Generator | Configuration | Resolution | VBench | UniPercept | Latency | Overhead |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WAN-5B | Direct high-res | 80.15 | 54.18 | 87.70 | – | |
| Low-res base | 79.43 | 48.14 | 33.59 | – | ||
| Low-res + SoL-Refiner | 81.22 | 54.49 | 39.75 | 6.16 | ||
| WAN-1.3B | Direct high-res | 79.73 | 55.08 | 272.69 | – | |
| Low-res base | 80.40 | 52.42 | 72.55 | – | ||
| Low-res + SoL-Refiner | 81.70 | 56.66 | 78.71 | 6.16 |
| Generator | Configuration | SC | BC | MS | DD | AQ | IQ | AVG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WAN-5B | Direct high-res | 0.92258 | 0.95235 | 0.98199 | 0.71333 | 0.58522 | 0.65348 | 0.80149 |
| Low-res base | 0.90244 | 0.92967 | 0.96584 | 0.82000 | 0.53374 | 0.61434 | 0.79434 | |
| Low-res + SoL-Refiner | 0.90250 | 0.94432 | 0.96426 | 0.82000 | 0.56545 | 0.67668 | 0.81220 | |
| WAN-1.3B | Direct high-res | 0.92994 | 0.95195 | 0.97886 | 0.71333 | 0.57893 | 0.63057 | 0.79727 |
| Low-res base | 0.92382 | 0.94247 | 0.97691 | 0.78000 | 0.57314 | 0.62767 | 0.80400 | |
| Low-res + SoL-Refiner | 0.92213 | 0.95378 | 0.97583 | 0.79333 | 0.59331 | 0.66346 | 0.81697 |
| Generator | Configuration | IAA | IQA | ISTA | AVG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WAN-5B | Direct high-res | 60.6266 | 61.3029 | 40.5970 | 54.1755 |
| Low-res base | 52.4973 | 53.1629 | 38.7562 | 48.1388 | |
| Low-res + SoL-Refiner | 59.1759 | 64.2542 | 40.0342 | 54.4881 | |
| WAN-1.3B | Direct high-res | 62.5408 | 62.5327 | 40.1709 | 55.0815 |
| Low-res base | 59.1791 | 58.7869 | 39.2797 | 52.4152 | |
| Low-res + SoL-Refiner | 63.1862 | 66.1531 | 40.6515 | 56.6636 |