Few-Step Streaming Video Generation via Condition Shifting
Few-step sampling reduces the cost of streaming video generation. Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) supervises few-step generators with a separate fake-score network, which adds training memory and computation and must track the evolving generator. We extend APEX to streaming video by using condition shifting to estimate the velocity field of the generated distribution within the generator. The original text condition selects generation, while a shifted condition selects fake estimation using the same parameters. This removes the independent fake network while retaining S2-Avatar's frozen reference teacher, Self-Replay Forcing, and perceptual regularization. We evaluate APEX on 180-second videos using three backbone evaluations per block and a one-step spatial Refiner, with a 70-case human study and a 320-case StreamAV-Bench comparison. Compared with S2-Avatar, APEX achieves high…