GVC-RT: Towards Real-Time Generative Video Compression at Ultra-Low Bitrates

Recent generative video codecs (GVCs) have achieved impressive reconstruction fidelity at ultra-low bitrates (< 0.02 bits per pixel) by compressing the tokens from generative tokenizers. However, existing GVCs generally require considerable computation time and model complexity, which hinder their deployment on compute-limited devices and in real-time applications. To bridge this gap, we systematically identify the computational bottlenecks and propose GVC-RT, which redesigns the generative latent coding framework to realize real-time video coding without sacrificing compression performance. Specifically, built on a pretrained lookup-free quantization (LFQ) tokenizer, GVC-RT adopts an asymmetric architecture that directly learns to match the LFQ latent distribution, while generative-space alignment is enforced via a regularization loss term only during training. In this manner, we bypass heavy tokenization and entirely remove the complex feature-alignment process at inference time. Moreover, we further introduce a lightweight de-tokenizer architecture to resolve the final latency bottleneck during decoding. Experimental results demonstrate that GVC-RT outperforms the previous SOTA model, GLC-Video, with average BD-rate savings of 12.4% and 48.8% in terms of DISTS and LPIPS, while achieving encoding/decoding speeds of 123.1/55.1 fps for 1080p video. The code is at https://github.com/semcomm/GVC-RT.