Towards One-Step Causal Video Generation via Adversarial Self-Distillation

Abstract

Recent hybrid video generation models combine autoregressive temporal dynamics with diffusion-based spatial denoising, but their sequential, iterative nature leads to error accumulation and long inference times. In this work, we propose a distillation-based framework for efficient causal video generation that enables high-quality synthesis with extreme limited denoising steps. Our approach builds upon Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) framework and proposes a novel form of Adversarial Self-Distillation (ASD) strategy, which aligns the outputs of the student model's $n$-step denoising process with its $(n+1)$-step version in the distribution level. This design provides smoother supervision by bridging small intra-student gaps and more informative guidance by combining teacher knowledge with locally consistent student behavior, substantially improving training stability and generation quality in extremely few-step scenarios. In addition, we present a First-Frame Enhancement (FFE) strategy, which allocates more denoising steps to the initial frames to mitigate error propagation while applying larger skipping steps to later frames. Extensive experiments on VBench demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in both one-step and two-step video generation. Notably, our framework produces a single distilled model that flexibly supports multiple inference-step settings, eliminating the need for repeated re-distillation and enabling efficient, high-quality video synthesis.