VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers

20 Apr 2021  ·  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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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Video Generation BAIR Robot Pushing VideoGPT FVD score 103.3 # 9
Cond 1 # 1
Pred 15 # 8
Train 15 # 2
Video Generation UCF-101 16 frames, 128x128, Unconditional VideoGPT Inception Score 24.69 # 3

Methods