English

PARE: Pruning and Adaptive Routing for Efficient Video Generation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-27 v1

Abstract

Video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) generate high-quality videos but demand substantial compute due to wide blocks, deep architectures, and iterative sampling. Recent methods reduce cost by compressing width, depth, or sampling steps, but typically commit to a fixed architecture that cannot adapt to individual inputs or denoising stages. We propose PARE (Pruning and Adaptive Routing for Efficient video generation), which jointly compresses width and depth with structure-aware pruning and input-adaptive routing. For width, we observe that attention heads specialize into spatial and temporal roles, and design importance scoring that accounts for this distinction to prevent motion-critical temporal heads from being pruned prematurely. For depth, we train a lightweight router conditioned on denoising timestep and visual content to dynamically select which blocks to execute at each step, enabling per-input compute adaptation rather than static block removal. A progressive pipeline first recovers width-pruned quality via distillation, then jointly optimizes the student and router to decouple the two learning objectives. Experiments on Wan2.1-14B for both image-to-video and text-to-video generation show that PARE substantially reduces per-step computation while preserving quality across VBench dimensions, and composes with step distillation for further acceleration.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.27336,
  title  = {PARE: Pruning and Adaptive Routing for Efficient Video Generation},
  author = {Yutong Wang and Yunke Wang and Tianfan Xue and Yu Qiao and Yaohui Wang and Xinyuan Chen and Chang Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.27336},
  year   = {2026}
}