Native Long Video Extrapolation
Junhao Zhuang · Shiyi Zhang · Yuxuan Bian · Yaowei Li · Yawen Luo · Weiyang Jin · Songchun Zhang ·
Xianglong He · Xuying Zhang · Haoran Li · Haoyang Huang · Zeyue Xue · Nan Duan
Joy Future Academy, JD
TL;DR — Self Gradient Forcing (SGF) recovers the missing context-gradient path for self-generated causal memory through a bounded two-pass replay, enabling models trained with only a 5-second window to extrapolate to minute-scale videos with stronger identity, layout, and temporal stability.
Abstract
SGF teaser: long-horizon consistency comparison

Recent autoregressive video diffusion methods are increasingly built upon Self Forcing, where the student is trained on histories produced by its own rollout rather than ground-truth video contexts. This reduces exposure bias, but the historical key-value cache is still used by future frames only as frozen rollout state. As a result, future losses cannot supervise how earlier generated latents should be written into more useful keys and values for later video-latent generation. We call this the historical context-gradient gap. We propose Self Gradient Forcing (SGF), a two-pass training strategy that restores this missing supervision signal without backpropagating through the full serial rollout. Pass 1 performs a no-gradient autoregressive rollout matching inference and, at a sampled denoising exit step, records both the self-generated context and the noisy latents fed to the model. Pass 2 performs parallel context-gradient reconstruction for the recorded exit step: the generated context is used as stop-gradient clean-latent input, while the model recomputes the context KV representations and future-to-context causal attention. Thus, SGF provides the missing memory-writing supervision within the native autoregressive training objective, using losses on future video latents to train the model to encode context into more effective causal memory. Across extensive long-horizon frame-wise and chunk-wise experiments under different initializations, SGF achieves stronger native long-video extrapolation than Self Forcing, especially in subject identity, background/layout consistency, and temporal stability. Remarkably, using only a 5-second training window, SGF can extrapolate to videos lasting several minutes.

Method

Self Forcing trains on self-generated histories but treats historical K/V entries as detached cache state. SGF keeps the no-gradient rollout unchanged and adds a parallel reconstruction pass, where detached context latents are re-encoded at the clean context timestep so future DMD losses supervise K/V writing without serial rollout backpropagation.

SGF training pipeline flowchart
Figure 1: From frozen-cache Self Forcing to Self Gradient Forcing.
Chunk-wise Long-Horizon Generation

Four-way comparison per sample — SGF (Ours), Self Forcing (SF), SF + Bi-directional ODE, SF + Causal ODE. All four tiles play in lock-step; use the controls on the SGF (Ours) tile to play, pause, or scrub. Pick a duration, then switch the AR / CD initialization.

60s Chunk-wise Long Video

240s Chunk-wise Long Video

Frame-wise Long-Horizon Generation

Two-way lock-step comparison per sample: SGF (Ours) vs Self Forcing. The SGF (Ours) tile carries the video controls; the Self Forcing tile follows it in play, pause, and scrub. Pick a duration, then switch the AR / CD / ODE initialization.

60s Frame-wise Long Video

240s Frame-wise Long Video

Analysis
Table 1: Training feasibility of context-gradient recovery

Direct differentiable-cache training keeps the serial cache-formation graph and runs out of memory. SGF uses bounded parallel context-gradient reconstruction at the sampled exit step, restoring context K/V gradients with modest peak-memory and runtime overhead.

Training variant Peak memory Stable memory Time / 5 steps Outcome
Self Forcing, frozen historical K/V cache 79.01GB 79.01GB 10.39s trains
SGF, serial Pass 1 + parallel Pass 2 87.01GB 63.73GB 11.71s trains
Self Forcing, differentiable historical K/V cache OOM OOM -- OOM
Pass-1 / Pass-2 recovery fidelity

SGF relies on Pass 2 faithfully replaying the sampled exit computation from Pass 1. Figure 2 and Table 2 are the same recovery diagnostic: the decoded pairs are visually nearly indistinguishable, while the latent metrics show low relative L2 error and near-unity cosine similarity across exit steps.

Decoded Pass-1 and Pass-2 recovery comparison
Figure 2: Decoded Pass-1 and Pass-2 recovery comparison. Rows show paired decoded outputs from Pass 1 and Pass 2 at exit steps 1000, 750, 500, and 250; the decoded pairs are visually nearly indistinguishable, matching the latent-space recovery results in Table 2.
Table 2: Pass-1 versus Pass-2 latent recovery fidelity

Metrics are averaged over 24 prompts for each exit step. Overall averages are computed over all 96 prompt/exit comparisons. We also report the relative L2 error normalized by the bf16 relative precision εbf16 = 2-7.

Exit step # comparisons MSE RMSE Mean abs. Max abs. Rel. L2 Rel. L2 / εbf16 Cosine
1000 24 3.123e-4 0.01745 0.01093 0.58396 0.02133 2.73 0.999766
750 24 2.148e-4 0.01449 0.00884 0.58189 0.01566 2.00 0.999874
500 24 1.141e-4 0.01064 0.00693 0.49110 0.01125 1.44 0.999936
250 24 6.041e-5 0.00774 0.00535 0.29028 0.00812 1.04 0.999967
Overall 96 1.754e-4 0.01258 0.00801 0.48681 0.01409 1.80 0.999886
BibTeX
@article{zhuang2026sgf,
  title  = {Self Gradient Forcing: Native Long Video Extrapolation},
  author = {Zhuang, Junhao and Zhang, Shiyi and Bian, Yuxuan and Li, Yaowei
            and Luo, Yawen and Jin, Weiyang and Zhang, Songchun and He, Xianglong
            and Zhang, Xuying and Li, Haoran and Huang, Haoyang and Xue, Zeyue
            and Duan, Nan},
  journal = {arXiv preprint},
  year    = {2026}
}