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SVG-EAR: Parameter-Free Linear Compensation for Sparse Video Generation via Error-aware Routing

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • Diffusion Transformers are effective for video generation but suffer from high quadratic attention costs, prompting exploration of sparse attention methods.
  • Prior sparse attention approaches either lose information by dropping attention blocks or add overhead by using learned predictors to approximate missing blocks.
  • SVG-EAR introduces a parameter-free linear compensation method leveraging cluster centroids to approximate skipped attention blocks without extra training.
  • The method uses error-aware routing, selecting blocks to compute based on estimated compensation error, balancing accuracy and efficiency.
  • Empirical results demonstrate that SVG-EAR significantly improves speed (up to 1.93x) while maintaining or improving generation quality on benchmark video diffusion tasks.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.08982 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Mar 2026]

Title:SVG-EAR: Parameter-Free Linear Compensation for Sparse Video Generation via Error-aware Routing

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Abstract:Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become a leading backbone for video generation, yet their quadratic attention cost remains a major bottleneck. Sparse attention reduces this cost by computing only a subset of attention blocks. However, prior methods often either drop the remaining blocks, which incurs information loss, or rely on learned predictors to approximate them, introducing training overhead and potential output distribution shifting. In this paper, we show that the missing contributions can be recovered without training: after semantic clustering, keys and values within each block exhibit strong similarity and can be well summarized by a small set of cluster centroids. Based on this observation, we introduce SVG-EAR, a parameter-free linear compensation branch that uses the centroid to approximate skipped blocks and recover their contributions. While centroid compensation is accurate for most blocks, it can fail on a small subset. Standard sparsification typically selects blocks by attention scores, which indicate where the model places its attention mass, but not where the approximation error would be largest. SVG-EAR therefore performs error-aware routing: a lightweight probe estimates the compensation error for each block, and we compute exactly the blocks with the highest error-to-cost ratio while compensating for skipped blocks. We provide theoretical guarantees that relate attention reconstruction error to clustering quality, and empirically show that SVG-EAR improves the quality-efficiency trade-off and increases throughput at the same generation fidelity on video diffusion tasks. Overall, SVG-EAR establishes a clear Pareto frontier over prior approaches, achieving up to 1.77$\times$ and 1.93$\times$ speedups while maintaining PSNRs of up to 29.759 and 31.043 on Wan2.2 and HunyuanVideo, respectively.
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.08982 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.08982v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.08982
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Qiuyang Mang [view email]
[v1] Mon, 9 Mar 2026 22:15:31 UTC (36,674 KB)
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