TinyNeRV: Compact Neural Video Representations via Capacity Scaling, Distillation, and Low-Precision Inference

TL;DR

This paper systematically explores extremely compact neural video representations, proposing lightweight NeRV variants, and investigates strategies like distillation and low-precision inference to maintain quality in resource-constrained environments.

Contribution

Introduces tiny NeRV architectures and strategies such as frequency-aware distillation and low-precision inference to enable efficient neural video representations.

Findings

Tiny NeRV variants achieve favorable quality-efficiency trade-offs.

Knowledge distillation improves reconstruction fidelity in low-capacity models.

Low-precision inference maintains robustness with reduced numerical precision.

Abstract

Implicit neural video representations encode entire video sequences within the parameters of a neural network and enable constant time frame reconstruction. Recent work on Neural Representations for Videos (NeRV) has demonstrated competitive reconstruction performance while avoiding the sequential decoding process of conventional video codecs. However, most existing studies focus on moderate or high capacity models, leaving the behavior of extremely compact configurations required for constrained environments insufficiently explored. This paper presents a systematic study of tiny NeRV architectures designed for efficient deployment. Two lightweight configurations, NeRV-T and NeRV-T+, are introduced and evaluated across multiple video datasets in order to analyze how aggressive capacity reduction affects reconstruction quality, computational complexity, and decoding throughput. Beyond architectural scaling, the work investigates strategies for improving the performance of compact models without increasing inference cost. Knowledge distillation with frequency-aware focal supervision is explored to enhance reconstruction fidelity in low-capacity networks. In addition, the impact of lowprecision inference is examined through both post training quantization and quantization aware training to study the robustness of tiny models under reduced numerical precision. Experimental results demonstrate that carefully designed tiny NeRV variants can achieve favorable quality efficiency trade offs while substantially reducing parameter count, computational cost, and memory requirements. These findings provide insight into the practical limits of compact neural video representations and offer guidance for deploying NeRV style models in resource constrained and real-time environments. The official implementation is available at https: //github.com/HannanAkhtar/TinyNeRV-Implementation.