image animation
Multi-identity Human Image Animation with Structural Video Diffusion
Wang, Zhenzhi, Li, Yixuan, Zeng, Yanhong, Guo, Yuwei, Lin, Dahua, Xue, Tianfan, Dai, Bo
Generating human videos from a single image while ensuring high visual quality and precise control is a challenging task, especially in complex scenarios involving multiple individuals and interactions with objects. Existing methods, while effective for single-human cases, often fail to handle the intricacies of multi-identity interactions because they struggle to associate the correct pairs of human appearance and pose condition and model the distribution of 3D-aware dynamics. T o address these limitations, we present Structural Video Diffusion, a novel framework designed for generating realistic multi-human videos. Our approach introduces two core innovations: identity-specific embed-dings to maintain consistent appearances across individuals and a structural learning mechanism that incorporates depth and surface-normal cues to model human-object interactions. Additionally, we expand existing human video dataset with 25K new videos featuring diverse multi-human and object interaction scenarios, providing a robust foundation for training. Experimental results demonstrate that Structural Video Diffusion achieves superior performance in generating lifelike, coherent videos for multiple subjects with dynamic and rich interactions, advancing the state of human-centric video generation. Code is available at here.
X-UniMotion: Animating Human Images with Expressive, Unified and Identity-Agnostic Motion Latents
Song, Guoxian, Xu, Hongyi, Zhao, Xiaochen, Xie, You, Gu, Tianpei, Li, Zenan, Zhang, Chenxu, Luo, Linjie
We present X-UniMotion, a unified and expressive implicit latent representation for whole-body human motion, encompassing facial expressions, body poses, and hand gestures. Unlike prior motion transfer methods that rely on explicit skeletal poses and heuristic cross-identity adjustments, our approach encodes multi-granular motion directly from a single image into a compact set of four disentangled latent tokens -- one for facial expression, one for body pose, and one for each hand. These motion latents are both highly expressive and identity-agnostic, enabling high-fidelity, detailed cross-identity motion transfer across subjects with diverse identities, poses, and spatial configurations. To achieve this, we introduce a self-supervised, end-to-end framework that jointly learns the motion encoder and latent representation alongside a DiT-based video generative model, trained on large-scale, diverse human motion datasets. Motion-identity disentanglement is enforced via 2D spatial and color augmentations, as well as synthetic 3D renderings of cross-identity subject pairs under shared poses. Furthermore, we guide motion token learning with auxiliary decoders that promote fine-grained, semantically aligned, and depth-aware motion embeddings. Extensive experiments show that X-UniMotion outperforms state-of-the-art methods, producing highly expressive animations with superior motion fidelity and identity preservation.
StableAnimator++: Overcoming Pose Misalignment and Face Distortion for Human Image Animation
Tu, Shuyuan, Xing, Zhen, Han, Xintong, Cheng, Zhi-Qi, Dai, Qi, Luo, Chong, Wu, Zuxuan, Jiang, Yu-Gang
Current diffusion models for human image animation often struggle to maintain identity (ID) consistency, especially when the reference image and driving video differ significantly in body size or position. We introduce StableAnimator++, the first ID-preserving video diffusion framework with learnable pose alignment, capable of generating high-quality videos conditioned on a reference image and a pose sequence without any post-processing. Building upon a video diffusion model, StableAnimator++ contains carefully designed modules for both training and inference, striving for identity consistency. In particular, StableAnimator++ first uses learnable layers to predict the similarity transformation matrices between the reference image and the driven poses via injecting guidance from Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). These matrices align the driven poses with the reference image, mitigating misalignment to a great extent. StableAnimator++ then computes image and face embeddings using off-the-shelf encoders, refining the face embeddings via a global content-aware Face Encoder. To further maintain ID, we introduce a distribution-aware ID Adapter that counteracts interference caused by temporal layers while preserving ID via distribution alignment. During the inference stage, we propose a novel Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) based face optimization integrated into the denoising process, guiding the diffusion trajectory for enhanced facial fidelity. Experiments on benchmarks show the effectiveness of StableAnimator++ both qualitatively and quantitatively.
DreamActor-M1: Holistic, Expressive and Robust Human Image Animation with Hybrid Guidance
Luo, Yuxuan, Rong, Zhengkun, Wang, Lizhen, Zhang, Longhao, Hu, Tianshu, Zhu, Yongming
While recent image-based human animation methods achieve realistic body and facial motion synthesis, critical gaps remain in fine-grained holistic controllability, multi-scale adaptability, and long-term temporal coherence, which leads to their lower expressiveness and robustness. We propose a diffusion transformer (DiT) based framework, DreamActor-M1, with hybrid guidance to overcome these limitations. For motion guidance, our hybrid control signals that integrate implicit facial representations, 3D head spheres, and 3D body skeletons achieve robust control of facial expressions and body movements, while producing expressive and identity-preserving animations. For scale adaptation, to handle various body poses and image scales ranging from portraits to full-body views, we employ a progressive training strategy using data with varying resolutions and scales. For appearance guidance, we integrate motion patterns from sequential frames with complementary visual references, ensuring long-term temporal coherence for unseen regions during complex movements. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art works, delivering expressive results for portraits, upper-body, and full-body generation with robust long-term consistency. Project Page: https://grisoon.github.io/DreamActor-M1/.
Reviews: First Order Motion Model for Image Animation
Summary: The system attacks the problem of generating images that conform to a given source image driven by motion estimated from a given video. These transformations are composed from transformations with respect to a common reference configuration. The sparse transformations are converted with a CNN into dense motion and occlusion masks. Finally, the motion and occlusion are combined by another neural network with the input image to create the final output. Positive: The paper introduces the novel idea of first order motion and occlusion modeling to unsupervised image animation.
Hallo3: Highly Dynamic and Realistic Portrait Image Animation with Diffusion Transformer Networks
Cui, Jiahao, Li, Hui, Zhan, Yun, Shang, Hanlin, Cheng, Kaihui, Ma, Yuqi, Mu, Shan, Zhou, Hang, Wang, Jingdong, Zhu, Siyu
Existing methodologies for animating portrait images face significant challenges, particularly in handling non-frontal perspectives, rendering dynamic objects around the portrait, and generating immersive, realistic backgrounds. In this paper, we introduce the first application of a pretrained transformer-based video generative model that demonstrates strong generalization capabilities and generates highly dynamic, realistic videos for portrait animation, effectively addressing these challenges. The adoption of a new video backbone model makes previous U-Net-based methods for identity maintenance, audio conditioning, and video extrapolation inapplicable. To address this limitation, we design an identity reference network consisting of a causal 3D VAE combined with a stacked series of transformer layers, ensuring consistent facial identity across video sequences. Additionally, we investigate various speech audio conditioning and motion frame mechanisms to enable the generation of continuous video driven by speech audio. Our method is validated through experiments on benchmark and newly proposed wild datasets, demonstrating substantial improvements over prior methods in generating realistic portraits characterized by diverse orientations within dynamic and immersive scenes. Further visualizations and the source code are available at: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/hallo3/.
MotiF: Making Text Count in Image Animation with Motion Focal Loss
Wang, Shijie, Azadi, Samaneh, Girdhar, Rohit, Rambhatla, Saketh, Sun, Chen, Yin, Xi
Text-Image-to-Video (TI2V) generation aims to generate a video from an image following a text description, which is also referred to as text-guided image animation. Most existing methods struggle to generate videos that align well with the text prompts, particularly when motion is specified. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MotiF, a simple yet effective approach that directs the model's learning to the regions with more motion, thereby improving the text alignment and motion generation. We use optical flow to generate a motion heatmap and weight the loss according to the intensity of the motion. This modified objective leads to noticeable improvements and complements existing methods that utilize motion priors as model inputs. Additionally, due to the lack of a diverse benchmark for evaluating TI2V generation, we propose TI2V Bench, a dataset consists of 320 image-text pairs for robust evaluation. We present a human evaluation protocol that asks the annotators to select an overall preference between two videos followed by their justifications. Through a comprehensive evaluation on TI2V Bench, MotiF outperforms nine open-sourced models, achieving an average preference of 72%. The TI2V Bench is released in https://wang-sj16.github.io/motif/.