VrYCLQ5inI@OpenReview

Total: 1

#1 Faster Video Diffusion with Trainable Sparse Attention [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Peiyuan Zhang, Yongqi Chen, Haofeng Huang, Will Lin, Zhengzhong Liu, Ion Stoica, Eric P. Xing, Hao Zhang

Scaling video diffusion transformers (DiTs) is limited by their quadratic 3D attention, even though most of the attention mass concentrates on a small subset of positions. We turn this observation into VSA, a trainable, hardware-efficient sparse attention that replaces full attention at both training and inference. In VSA, a lightweight coarse stage pools tokens into tiles and identifies high-weight critical tokens; a fine stage computes token-level attention only inside those tiles subjecting to block computing layout to ensure hard efficiency. This leads to a single differentiable kernel that trains end-to-end, requires no post-hoc profiling, and sustains 85\% of FlashAttention3 MFU. We perform a large sweep of ablation studies and scaling-law experiments by pretraining DiTs from 60M to 1.4B parameters. VSA reaches a Pareto point that cuts training FLOPS by 2.53$\times$ with no drop in diffusion loss. Retrofitting the open-source Wan2.1-1.3B model speeds up attention time by 6$\times$ and lowers end-to-end generation time from 31s to 18s with comparable quality, while for the 14B model, end-to-end generation time is reduced from 1274s to 576s. Furthermore, we introduce a preliminary study of Sparse-Distill, the first method to enable sparse attention and distillation concurrently, achieving 50.9x speed up for Wan-1.3B while maintaining quality. These results establish trainable sparse attention as a practical alternative to full attention and a key enabler for further scaling of video diffusion models. Code is available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/FastVideo.

Subject: NeurIPS.2025 - Poster