Tracktention: Leveraging Point Tracking to Attend Videos Faster and
  Better
Authors: name: Zihang Lai, name: Andrea Vedaldi

Temporal consistency is critical in video prediction to ensure that outputs
are coherent and free of artifacts. Traditional methods, such as temporal
attention and 3D convolution, may struggle with significant object motion and
may not capture long-range temporal dependencies in dynamic scenes. To address
this gap, we propose the Tracktention Layer, a novel architectural component
that explicitly integrates motion information using point tracks, i.e.,
sequences of corresponding points across frames. By incorporating these motion
cues, the Tracktention Layer enhances temporal alignment and effectively
handles complex object motions, maintaining consistent feature representations
over time. Our approach is computationally efficient and can be seamlessly
integrated into existing models, such as Vision Transformers, with minimal
modification. It can be used to upgrade image-only models to state-of-the-art
video ones, sometimes outperforming models natively designed for video
prediction. We demonstrate this on video depth prediction and video
colorization, where models augmented with the Tracktention Layer exhibit
significantly improved temporal consistency compared to baselines.