Video Generation Models are General-Purpose Vision Learners

🎬">

Video Generation Models are<br>General-Purpose Vision Learners

Letian Wang1,2<br>Chuhan Zhang1<br>Rishabh Kabra1,3<br>Jasper Uijlings1<br>Steven Waslander2<br>Andrew Zisserman1,4<br>Joao Carreira1<br>Kaiming He1,5<br>Misha Andriluka1<br>Eduard Gabriel Bazavan1<br>Andrei Zanfir1<br>Cristian Sminchisescu1,6,*

1Google DeepMind 2University of Toronto 3University College London 4University of Oxford 5MIT 6Lund University

*Work done while at Google DeepMind.

ECCV 2026

pdf<br>arXiv<br>Twitter<br>Code (TBA)

Overview

Your browser does not support the video tag.

TL;DR

Pushing computer vision from the task-specific era toward general-purpose visual intelligence — just as NLP evolved from task-specific models into general-purpose language intelligence.

GenCeption repurposes a pre-trained video generative model into a single unified, general-purpose, feed-forward vision model that solves a wide range of vision tasks with SOTA performance — all steered by text instructions, with exceptional learning efficiency and intriguing emergent behaviors.

Visual Generative Pretraining

GenCeption leverages video generation models as representation pretraining, and conducts multi-task post-training in a unified architecture.

Unified & Feed-Forward

GenCeption handles both dense and sparse vision tasks, transforming the multi-step generative backbone into a single-step feed-forward model.

SOTA & Emergent

GenCeption is a SOTA unified model on various vision tasks, with exceptional learning efficiency and intriguing emerging behaviors.

Methodology

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Methodology. GenCeption leverages a video generative diffusion model as a pre-training base to capture rich spatio-temporal world priors and native vision-language alignment at scale. During multi-task post-training, the model is adapted to a feed-forward model fine-tuned on predominantly synthetic data to handle diverse perception tasks. GenCeption shows strong performance on multiple vision tasks with intriguing Emerging Behaviors, enabling seamless sim-to-real transfer and generalization to out-of-distribution object categories.

Paradigm Shift. This highlights a paradigm shift from specialized, task-specific computer vision models toward fully unified, generalist vision models — just as NLP evolved from task-specific models into general-purpose language intelligence.

Steered by text instructions, GenCeption is capable of a wide spectrum of perception tasks, each with one feed-forward pass of the model — depth, surface-normal and camera-pose estimation, foreground and expression-referring open-world segmentation, and 2D/3D keypoint prediction — all under a single, task-agnostic architecture.

-->

Results

SOTA performance: GenCeption is competitive with or outperforms state-of-the-art models dedicated to individual tasks (DepthAnything3, D4RT, VGGT-&Omega;, SAM3, Sapiens, DAVID, Genmo, Lotus-2). Our specialist denotes a model trained on each task individually, whereas the generalist represents a single model trained jointly across multiple tasks.

Data efficiency: under matched fine-tuning data, the video-generative backbone beats alternative pre-training paradigms (V-JEPA, VideoMAE V2), shows preliminary scaling properties, where it improves with larger models and more data, and reaches performance comparable to D4RT and VGGT-&Omega; with 7&times; to 500&times; less training data.

Put the file in assets/ (or use a hosted URL for large videos).<br>-->

Overview Video

Overview video — coming soon

-->

Architecture

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Architecture overview of GenCeption, a simple yet powerful architecture adapted from text-to-video diffusion models. Given an input video and a text prompt specifying the desired output, our unified model, trained majorly on synthetic data, is capable of performing a wide range of dense and sparse perception tasks, with a single forward-pass of the model. The dense vision tasks are unified in the RGB ambient space where supervision can be applied in latent space efficiently, and the sparse vision tasks are realized by adding learnable tokens as additional inputs to the diffusion transformer (DiT).

Video Any-Task Capabilities

GenCeption is able to seamlessly switch between different vision tasks, just like how humans do in real life.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Native Vision-Language Alignment

Given a natural-language expression, GenCeption accurately segments the referred object — reasoning about colors, spatial relationships and motion — and generalizes to unseen objects (e.g., a rocket) by leveraging knowledge from text-to-video pre-training.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Understanding the Complex Visual World

As an example of pushing the boundaries of understanding the complex visual world, GenCeption predicts 4D human keypoints under challenging conditions (complex motion, occlusion, ego-centric,...