Papers › VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers

VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers

20 Apr 2021arXiv:2104.10157archive 2025-07-28

Wilson Yan, Yunzhi Zhang, Pieter Abbeel, Aravind Srinivas

We present VideoGPT: a conceptually simple architecture for scaling likelihood based generative modeling to natural videos. VideoGPT uses VQ-VAE that learns downsampled discrete latent representations of a raw video by employing 3D convolutions and axial self-attention. A simple GPT-like architecture is then used to autoregressively model the discrete latents using spatio-temporal position encodings. Despite the simplicity in formulation and ease of training, our architecture is able to generate samples competitive with state-of-the-art GAN models for video generation on the BAIR Robot dataset, and generate high fidelity natural videos from UCF-101 and Tumbler GIF Dataset (TGIF). We hope our proposed architecture serves as a reproducible reference for a minimalistic implementation of transformer based video generation models. Samples and code are available at https://wilson1yan.github.io/videogpt/index.html

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Code

wilson1yan/VideoGPT officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Alescontrela/viper_rl mentioned on GitHubjaxMIT report
alescontrela/viper mentioned on GitHubjaxMIT report

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Tasks

Video Generation

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Video Generation BAIR Robot Pushing VideoGPT Cond 1 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Generation BAIR Robot Pushing VideoGPT FVD score 103.3 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Generation BAIR Robot Pushing VideoGPT Pred 15 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Generation BAIR Robot Pushing VideoGPT Train 15 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Generation UCF-101 16 frames, 128x128, Unconditional VideoGPT Inception Score 24.69 #3 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

VQ-VAE

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