Goodbye Drift: Anchored Tree Sampling for Long-Horizon Video-to-Video Generation
Long-term video generation often suffers from visual degradation and temporal inconsistency due to frame-by-frame autoregressive modeling. This work proposes Anchor Tree Sampling (ATS), a training-free inference scheduling method that introduces hierarchical tree-structured generation to video-to-video tasks for the first time. ATS leverages sparse anchor initialization, recursive refinement, and leaf-node interpolation, operating under a static camera assumption to support diverse multimodal conditions—including inpainting, pose, and depth maps. By confining temporal drift within anchor intervals, ATS substantially shortens the critical generation path. Experiments demonstrate that ATS outperforms existing autoregressive baselines on Wan 2.1 + VACE across five conditioning modalities, consistently improving both output quality and drift resistance, and enables stable generation of high-quality videos exceeding 40 minutes in duration on LTX-2.3.