Learning the Autoregressive: Direct Score-Difference Estimation with Amortized Future Credit for Video Distillation

Overview & Synopsis

Few-step distillation for autoregressive (AR) video generation commonly first initializes an AR student and then refines it with distribution matching distillation (DMD). This refinement process faces two challenges. First, although initialization already yields a reasonably capable student, DMD obtains the refinement direction indirectly by estimating the full student score before forming the teacher-student correction. Second, detached-history training prevents the generator from assigning credit to a current chunk for its influence on subsequent chunks. We introduce Leta, a few-step distillation framework that addresses these challenges with ScoreDelta and FutureCredit. ScoreDelta directly estimates the teacher-student correction from denoising residuals, while FutureCredit learns an auxiliary cross-chunk update signal from vector-Jacobian products (VJPs) of next-chunk teacher residuals. Leta combines these signals into a joint teacher-guided update field in a single forward pass during generator updates. Teacher evaluations and credit VJPs are used only for estimator training. For ScoreDelta, we establish population equivalence to score-difference estimation and a conditional approximation advantage under limited capacity in a fixed-feature linear model. In our controlled experiments, Leta improves over DMD by 0.9 points on VBench and 0.66 on VideoAlign. This advantage persists at a higher generator update frequency (a generator-to-estimator update ratio of G:E=1:1), where Leta improves over DMD by 1.6 on VBench and 0.35 on VideoAlign. Project page: https://scdzx.github.io/Leta/.