VideoGen: A Reference-Guided Latent Diffusion Approach for High Definition Text-to-Video Generation
This addresses the problem of generating high-quality videos from text for applications in media and entertainment, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles text-to-video generation by proposing VideoGen, which uses a reference image from a text-to-image model to guide latent diffusion, resulting in high-definition videos with improved fidelity and temporal consistency, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.
In this paper, we present VideoGen, a text-to-video generation approach, which can generate a high-definition video with high frame fidelity and strong temporal consistency using reference-guided latent diffusion. We leverage an off-the-shelf text-to-image generation model, e.g., Stable Diffusion, to generate an image with high content quality from the text prompt, as a reference image to guide video generation. Then, we introduce an efficient cascaded latent diffusion module conditioned on both the reference image and the text prompt, for generating latent video representations, followed by a flow-based temporal upsampling step to improve the temporal resolution. Finally, we map latent video representations into a high-definition video through an enhanced video decoder. During training, we use the first frame of a ground-truth video as the reference image for training the cascaded latent diffusion module. The main characterises of our approach include: the reference image generated by the text-to-image model improves the visual fidelity; using it as the condition makes the diffusion model focus more on learning the video dynamics; and the video decoder is trained over unlabeled video data, thus benefiting from high-quality easily-available videos. VideoGen sets a new state-of-the-art in text-to-video generation in terms of both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. See \url{https://videogen.github.io/VideoGen/} for more samples.