Reward-Forcing: Autoregressive Video Generation with Reward Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Jingran, Li, Ning, Ban, Yuanhao, Bai, Andrew, Cui, Justin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Jingran
Li, Ning
Ban, Yuanhao
Bai, Andrew
Cui, Justin
author_facet Zhang, Jingran
Li, Ning
Ban, Yuanhao
Bai, Andrew
Cui, Justin
contents While most prior work in video generation relies on bidirectional architectures, recent efforts have sought to adapt these models into autoregressive variants to support near real-time generation. However, such adaptations often depend heavily on teacher models, which can limit performance, particularly in the absence of a strong autoregressive teacher, resulting in output quality that typically lags behind their bidirectional counterparts. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that uses reward signals to guide the generation process, enabling more efficient and scalable autoregressive generation. By using reward signals to guide the model, our method simplifies training while preserving high visual fidelity and temporal consistency. Through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, we find that our approach performs comparably to existing autoregressive models and, in some cases, surpasses similarly sized bidirectional models by avoiding constraints imposed by teacher architectures. For example, on VBench, our method achieves a total score of 84.92, closely matching state-of-the-art autoregressive methods that score 84.31 but require significant heterogeneous distillation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_16933
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reward-Forcing: Autoregressive Video Generation with Reward Feedback
Zhang, Jingran
Li, Ning
Ban, Yuanhao
Bai, Andrew
Cui, Justin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
While most prior work in video generation relies on bidirectional architectures, recent efforts have sought to adapt these models into autoregressive variants to support near real-time generation. However, such adaptations often depend heavily on teacher models, which can limit performance, particularly in the absence of a strong autoregressive teacher, resulting in output quality that typically lags behind their bidirectional counterparts. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that uses reward signals to guide the generation process, enabling more efficient and scalable autoregressive generation. By using reward signals to guide the model, our method simplifies training while preserving high visual fidelity and temporal consistency. Through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, we find that our approach performs comparably to existing autoregressive models and, in some cases, surpasses similarly sized bidirectional models by avoiding constraints imposed by teacher architectures. For example, on VBench, our method achieves a total score of 84.92, closely matching state-of-the-art autoregressive methods that score 84.31 but require significant heterogeneous distillation.
title Reward-Forcing: Autoregressive Video Generation with Reward Feedback
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16933