Pusa V1.0: Unlocking Temporal Control in Pretrained Video Diffusion Models via Vectorized Timestep Adaptation

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission6133 Authors

Keywords: Vectorized Timesteps, Flow Matching, Temporal Modeling, Video Generation

TL;DR: Pusa proposes a new fintuing paradigm that leverages vectorized timestep adaptation (VTA) to enable fine-grained temporal control within a unified video diffusion framework, achieving SOTA level performance with unprecedented training efficiency

Abstract:

The rapid advancement of video diffusion models has been hindered by fundamental limitations in temporal modeling, particularly the rigid synchronization of frame evolution imposed by conventional scalar timestep variables. While task-specific adaptations and autoregressive models have sought to address these challenges, they remain constrained by computational inefficiency, catastrophic forgetting, or narrow applicability. In this work, we present \textbf{Pusa} V1.0, a versatile model that leverages \textbf{vectorized timestep adaptation (VTA)} to enable fine-grained temporal control within a unified video diffusion framework. Note that VTA is a non-destructive adaptation, which means that it fully preserves the capabilities of the base model.
\textbf{Unlike conventional methods like Wan-I2V, which finetune a base text-to-video (T2V) model with abundant resources to do image-to-video (I2V), we achieve comparable results in a zero-shot manner after an ultra-efficient finetuning process based on VTA. Moreover, this method also unlocks many other zero-shot capabilities simultaneously, such as start-end frames and video extension ---all without task-specific training. Meanwhile, it keeps the T2V capability from the base model.} Mechanistic analyses also reveal that our approach preserves the foundation model's generative priors while surgically injecting temporal dynamics, avoiding the combinatorial explosion inherent to the vectorized timestep. This work establishes a scalable, efficient, and versatile paradigm for next-generation video synthesis, democratizing high-fidelity video generation for research and industry alike.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 6133