Scaling Autoregressive Video Models
This work addresses the problem of generating high-quality video continuations for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing autoregressive methods with a new architectural tweak.
The authors tackled video generation by proposing a simple autoregressive model with 3D self-attention, achieving competitive results on benchmarks with high fidelity and realism, and demonstrated occasional realistic continuations on the complex Kinetics dataset.
Due to the statistical complexity of video, the high degree of inherent stochasticity, and the sheer amount of data, generating natural video remains a challenging task. State-of-the-art video generation models often attempt to address these issues by combining sometimes complex, usually video-specific neural network architectures, latent variable models, adversarial training and a range of other methods. Despite their often high complexity, these approaches still fall short of generating high quality video continuations outside of narrow domains and often struggle with fidelity. In contrast, we show that conceptually simple autoregressive video generation models based on a three-dimensional self-attention mechanism achieve competitive results across multiple metrics on popular benchmark datasets, for which they produce continuations of high fidelity and realism. We also present results from training our models on Kinetics, a large scale action recognition dataset comprised of YouTube videos exhibiting phenomena such as camera movement, complex object interactions and diverse human movement. While modeling these phenomena consistently remains elusive, we hope that our results, which include occasional realistic continuations encourage further research on comparatively complex, large scale datasets such as Kinetics.