Attention Surgery: An Efficient Recipe to Linearize Your Video Diffusion Transformer

Abstract

Transformer-based video diffusion models (VDMs) deliver state-of-the-art video generation quality but are constrained by the quadratic cost of self-attention, making long sequences and high resolutions computationally expensive. While linear attention offers sub-quadratic complexity, previous approaches have failed to match the expressiveness of softmax attention unless retrained at significant computational cost. We introduce Attention Surgery, an efficient framework that enables linear or hybrid attention in pretrained VDMs, eliminating the need for training from scratch. Inspired by recent advances in language models, our method combines a novel hybrid attention mechanism-mixing softmax and linear tokens-with a lightweight distillation and fine-tuning pipeline requiring only a few GPU-days. Additionally, we incorporate a cost-aware block-rate strategy to balance expressiveness and efficiency across layers. Applied to Wan2.1 1.3B, a state-of-the-art efficient transformer VDM and evaluated on VBench, VBench2.0 and a human preference study, Attention Surgery achieves competitive results. Furthermore, measurements of on-mobile latency, memory usage, and FLOPs demonstrate notable improvements in scaling behavior for longer videos. Project page is available at: https://qualcomm-ai-research.github.io/attention-surgery.