ExtDM: Distribution Extrapolation Diffusion Model for Video Prediction
Authors: Zhicheng Zhang, Junyao Hu, Wentao Cheng, Danda Paudel, Jufeng Yang

Video prediction is a challenging task due to its nature of uncertainty especially for forecasting a long period. To model the temporal dynamics advanced methods benefit from the recent success of diffusion models and repeatedly refine the predicted future frames with 3D spatiotemporal U-Net. However there exists a gap between the present and future and the repeated usage of U-Net brings a heavy computation burden. To address this we propose a diffusion-based video prediction method that predicts future frames by extrapolating the present distribution of features namely ExtDM. Specifically our method consists of three components: (i) a motion autoencoder conducts a bijection transformation between video frames and motion cues; (ii) a layered distribution adaptor module extrapolates the present features in the guidance of Gaussian distribution; (iii) a 3D U-Net architecture specialized for jointly fusing guidance and features among the temporal dimension by spatiotemporal-window attention. Extensive experiments on five popular benchmarks covering short- and long-term video prediction verify the effectiveness of ExtDM.