Video Prediction Transformers Without Recurrence or Convolution

Abstract

Video prediction has witnessed the emergence of RNN-based models led by ConvLSTM, and CNN-based models led by SimVP. Following the significant success of ViT, recent works have integrated ViT into both RNN and CNN frameworks, achieving improved performance. While we appreciate these prior approaches, we raise a fundamental question: Is there a simpler yet more effective solution that can eliminate the high computational cost of RNNs while addressing the limited receptive fields and poor generalization of CNNs? How far can it go with a simple pure transformer model for video prediction? In this paper, we propose PredFormer, a framework entirely based on Gated Transformers. We provide a comprehensive analysis of 3D Attention in the context of video prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PredFormer delivers state-of-the-art performance across four standard benchmarks. The significant improvements in both accuracy and efficiency highlight the potential of PredFormer as a strong baseline for real-world video prediction applications. The source code and trained models will be released to the public.