Daily Papers

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation.To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of copyright-free real-world videos from the internet. Through a carefully designed rule-based filtering strategy, we ensure the inclusion of high-quality videos, resulting in a collection of 20K human-centric videos in 1080P resolution. Human and camera motion annotation is accomplished using a 2D pose estimator and a SLAM-based method. For the synthetic data, we gather 2,300 copyright-free 3D avatar assets to augment existing available 3D assets. Notably, we introduce a rule-based camera trajectory generation method, enabling the synthetic pipeline to incorporate diverse and precise camera motion annotation, which can rarely be found in real-world data. To verify the effectiveness of HumanVid, we establish a baseline model named CamAnimate, short for Camera-controllable Human Animation, that considers both human and camera motions as conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that such simple baseline training on our HumanVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling both human pose and camera motions, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/HumanVid/.

Human image animation has gained increasing attention and developed rapidly due to its broad applications in digital humans. However, existing methods rely largely on 2D-rendered pose images for motion guidance, which limits generalization and discards essential 3D information for open-world animation. To tackle this problem, we propose MTVCrafter (Motion Tokenization Video Crafter), the first framework that directly models raw 3D motion sequences (i.e., 4D motion) for human image animation. Specifically, we introduce 4DMoT (4D motion tokenizer) to quantize 3D motion sequences into 4D motion tokens. Compared to 2D-rendered pose images, 4D motion tokens offer more robust spatio-temporal cues and avoid strict pixel-level alignment between pose image and character, enabling more flexible and disentangled control. Then, we introduce MV-DiT (Motion-aware Video DiT). By designing unique motion attention with 4D positional encodings, MV-DiT can effectively leverage motion tokens as 4D compact yet expressive context for human image animation in the complex 3D world. Hence, it marks a significant step forward in this field and opens a new direction for pose-guided human video generation. Experiments show that our MTVCrafter achieves state-of-the-art results with an FID-VID of 6.98, surpassing the second-best by 65%. Powered by robust motion tokens, MTVCrafter also generalizes well to diverse open-world characters (single/multiple, full/half-body) across various styles and scenarios. Our video demos and code are on: https://github.com/DINGYANB/MTVCrafter.

Human image animation aims to generate human videos of given characters and backgrounds that adhere to the desired pose sequence. However, existing methods focus more on human actions while neglecting the generation of background, which typically leads to static results or inharmonious movements. The community has explored camera pose-guided animation tasks, yet preparing the camera trajectory is impractical for most entertainment applications and ordinary users. As a remedy, we present an AnimateAnywhere framework, rousing the background in human image animation without requirements on camera trajectories. In particular, based on our key insight that the movement of the human body often reflects the motion of the background, we introduce a background motion learner (BML) to learn background motions from human pose sequences. To encourage the model to learn more accurate cross-frame correspondences, we further deploy an epipolar constraint on the 3D attention map. Specifically, the mask used to suppress geometrically unreasonable attention is carefully constructed by combining an epipolar mask and the current 3D attention map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AnimateAnywhere effectively learns the background motion from human pose sequences, achieving state-of-the-art performance in generating human animation results with vivid and realistic backgrounds. The source code and model will be available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/AnimateAnywhere.

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

Controllable human image animation aims to generate videos from reference images using driving videos. Due to the limited control signals provided by sparse guidance (e.g., skeleton pose), recent works have attempted to introduce additional dense conditions (e.g., depth map) to ensure motion alignment. However, such strict dense guidance impairs the quality of the generated video when the body shape of the reference character differs significantly from that of the driving video. In this paper, we present DisPose to mine more generalizable and effective control signals without additional dense input, which disentangles the sparse skeleton pose in human image animation into motion field guidance and keypoint correspondence. Specifically, we generate a dense motion field from a sparse motion field and the reference image, which provides region-level dense guidance while maintaining the generalization of the sparse pose control. We also extract diffusion features corresponding to pose keypoints from the reference image, and then these point features are transferred to the target pose to provide distinct identity information. To seamlessly integrate into existing models, we propose a plug-and-play hybrid ControlNet that improves the quality and consistency of generated videos while freezing the existing model parameters. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of DisPose compared to current methods. Code: https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose{https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose}.

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/.

This paper studies the human image animation task, which aims to generate a video of a certain reference identity following a particular motion sequence. Existing animation works typically employ the frame-warping technique to animate the reference image towards the target motion. Despite achieving reasonable results, these approaches face challenges in maintaining temporal consistency throughout the animation due to the lack of temporal modeling and poor preservation of reference identity. In this work, we introduce MagicAnimate, a diffusion-based framework that aims at enhancing temporal consistency, preserving reference image faithfully, and improving animation fidelity. To achieve this, we first develop a video diffusion model to encode temporal information. Second, to maintain the appearance coherence across frames, we introduce a novel appearance encoder to retain the intricate details of the reference image. Leveraging these two innovations, we further employ a simple video fusion technique to encourage smooth transitions for long video animation. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our method over baseline approaches on two benchmarks. Notably, our approach outperforms the strongest baseline by over 38% in terms of video fidelity on the challenging TikTok dancing dataset. Code and model will be made available.

In this study, we introduce a methodology for human image animation by leveraging a 3D human parametric model within a latent diffusion framework to enhance shape alignment and motion guidance in curernt human generative techniques. The methodology utilizes the SMPL(Skinned Multi-Person Linear) model as the 3D human parametric model to establish a unified representation of body shape and pose. This facilitates the accurate capture of intricate human geometry and motion characteristics from source videos. Specifically, we incorporate rendered depth images, normal maps, and semantic maps obtained from SMPL sequences, alongside skeleton-based motion guidance, to enrich the conditions to the latent diffusion model with comprehensive 3D shape and detailed pose attributes. A multi-layer motion fusion module, integrating self-attention mechanisms, is employed to fuse the shape and motion latent representations in the spatial domain. By representing the 3D human parametric model as the motion guidance, we can perform parametric shape alignment of the human body between the reference image and the source video motion. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the methodology's superior ability to generate high-quality human animations that accurately capture both pose and shape variations. Furthermore, our approach also exhibits superior generalization capabilities on the proposed wild dataset. Project page: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/champ.

We introduce X-Dyna, a novel zero-shot, diffusion-based pipeline for animating a single human image using facial expressions and body movements derived from a driving video, that generates realistic, context-aware dynamics for both the subject and the surrounding environment. Building on prior approaches centered on human pose control, X-Dyna addresses key shortcomings causing the loss of dynamic details, enhancing the lifelike qualities of human video animations. At the core of our approach is the Dynamics-Adapter, a lightweight module that effectively integrates reference appearance context into the spatial attentions of the diffusion backbone while preserving the capacity of motion modules in synthesizing fluid and intricate dynamic details. Beyond body pose control, we connect a local control module with our model to capture identity-disentangled facial expressions, facilitating accurate expression transfer for enhanced realism in animated scenes. Together, these components form a unified framework capable of learning physical human motion and natural scene dynamics from a diverse blend of human and scene videos. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that X-Dyna outperforms state-of-the-art methods, creating highly lifelike and expressive animations. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/X-Dyna.

This report presents UniAnimate-DiT, an advanced project that leverages the cutting-edge and powerful capabilities of the open-source Wan2.1 model for consistent human image animation. Specifically, to preserve the robust generative capabilities of the original Wan2.1 model, we implement Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) technique to fine-tune a minimal set of parameters, significantly reducing training memory overhead. A lightweight pose encoder consisting of multiple stacked 3D convolutional layers is designed to encode motion information of driving poses. Furthermore, we adopt a simple concatenation operation to integrate the reference appearance into the model and incorporate the pose information of the reference image for enhanced pose alignment. Experimental results show that our approach achieves visually appearing and temporally consistent high-fidelity animations. Trained on 480p (832x480) videos, UniAnimate-DiT demonstrates strong generalization capabilities to seamlessly upscale to 720P (1280x720) during inference. The training and inference code is publicly available at https://github.com/ali-vilab/UniAnimate-DiT.

Recent advances in video diffusion models have enabled realistic and controllable human image animation with temporal coherence. Although generating reasonable results, existing methods often overlook the need for regional supervision in crucial areas such as the face and hands, and neglect the explicit modeling for motion blur, leading to unrealistic low-quality synthesis. To address these limitations, we first leverage regional supervision for detailed regions to enhance face and hand faithfulness. Second, we model the motion blur explicitly to further improve the appearance quality. Third, we explore novel training strategies for high-resolution human animation to improve the overall fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving significant improvements upon the strongest baseline by more than 21.0% and 57.4% in terms of reconstruction precision (L1) and perceptual quality (FVD) on HumanDance dataset. Code and model will be made available.

Current diffusion models for human image animation struggle to ensure identity (ID) consistency. This paper presents StableAnimator, the first end-to-end ID-preserving video diffusion framework, which synthesizes high-quality videos without any post-processing, conditioned on a reference image and a sequence of poses. Building upon a video diffusion model, StableAnimator contains carefully designed modules for both training and inference striving for identity consistency. In particular, StableAnimator begins by computing image and face embeddings with off-the-shelf extractors, respectively and face embeddings are further refined by interacting with image embeddings using a global content-aware Face Encoder. Then, StableAnimator introduces a novel distribution-aware ID Adapter that prevents interference caused by temporal layers while preserving ID via alignment. During inference, we propose a novel Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation-based optimization to further enhance the face quality. We demonstrate that solving the HJB equation can be integrated into the diffusion denoising process, and the resulting solution constrains the denoising path and thus benefits ID preservation. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show the effectiveness of StableAnimator both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Pose-driven human image animation has achieved tremendous progress, enabling the generation of vivid and realistic human videos from just one single photo. However, it conversely exacerbates the risk of image misuse, as attackers may use one available image to create videos involving politics, violence and other illegal content. To counter this threat, we propose Dormant, a novel protection approach tailored to defend against pose-driven human image animation techniques. Dormant applies protective perturbation to one human image, preserving the visual similarity to the original but resulting in poor-quality video generation. The protective perturbation is optimized to induce misextraction of appearance features from the image and create incoherence among the generated video frames. Our extensive evaluation across 8 animation methods and 4 datasets demonstrates the superiority of Dormant over 6 baseline protection methods, leading to misaligned identities, visual distortions, noticeable artifacts, and inconsistent frames in the generated videos. Moreover, Dormant shows effectiveness on 6 real-world commercial services, even with fully black-box access.

Recent diffusion-based human image animation techniques have demonstrated impressive success in synthesizing videos that faithfully follow a given reference identity and a sequence of desired movement poses. Despite this, there are still two limitations: i) an extra reference model is required to align the identity image with the main video branch, which significantly increases the optimization burden and model parameters; ii) the generated video is usually short in time (e.g., 24 frames), hampering practical applications. To address these shortcomings, we present a UniAnimate framework to enable efficient and long-term human video generation. First, to reduce the optimization difficulty and ensure temporal coherence, we map the reference image along with the posture guidance and noise video into a common feature space by incorporating a unified video diffusion model. Second, we propose a unified noise input that supports random noised input as well as first frame conditioned input, which enhances the ability to generate long-term video. Finally, to further efficiently handle long sequences, we explore an alternative temporal modeling architecture based on state space model to replace the original computation-consuming temporal Transformer. Extensive experimental results indicate that UniAnimate achieves superior synthesis results over existing state-of-the-art counterparts in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Notably, UniAnimate can even generate highly consistent one-minute videos by iteratively employing the first frame conditioning strategy. Code and models will be publicly available. Project page: https://unianimate.github.io/.

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved conditional video generation, particularly in the pose-guided human image animation task. Although existing methods are capable of generating high-fidelity and time-consistent animation sequences in regular motions and static scenes, there are still obvious limitations when facing complex human body motions (Hypermotion) that contain highly dynamic, non-standard motions, and the lack of a high-quality benchmark for evaluation of complex human motion animations. To address this challenge, we introduce the Open-HyperMotionX Dataset and HyperMotionX Bench, which provide high-quality human pose annotations and curated video clips for evaluating and improving pose-guided human image animation models under complex human motion conditions. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet powerful DiT-based video generation baseline and design spatial low-frequency enhanced RoPE, a novel module that selectively enhances low-frequency spatial feature modeling by introducing learnable frequency scaling. Our method significantly improves structural stability and appearance consistency in highly dynamic human motion sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and proposed approach in advancing the generation quality of complex human motion image animations. Code and dataset will be made publicly available.

With diffusion transformer (DiT) excelling in video generation, its use in specific tasks has drawn increasing attention. However, adapting DiT for pose-guided human image animation faces two core challenges: (a) existing U-Net-based pose control methods may be suboptimal for the DiT backbone; and (b) removing text guidance, as in previous approaches, often leads to semantic loss and model degradation. To address these issues, we propose DynamiCtrl, a novel framework for human animation in video DiT architecture. Specifically, we use a shared VAE encoder for human images and driving poses, unifying them into a common latent space, maintaining pose fidelity, and eliminating the need for an expert pose encoder during video denoising. To integrate pose control into the DiT backbone effectively, we propose a novel Pose-adaptive Layer Norm model. It injects normalized pose features into the denoising process via conditioning on visual tokens, enabling seamless and scalable pose control across DiT blocks. Furthermore, to overcome the shortcomings of text removal, we introduce the "Joint-text" paradigm, which preserves the role of text embeddings to provide global semantic context. Through full-attention blocks, image and pose features are aligned with text features, enhancing semantic consistency, leveraging pretrained knowledge, and enabling multi-level control. Experiments verify the superiority of DynamiCtrl on benchmark and self-collected data (e.g., achieving the best LPIPS of 0.166), demonstrating strong character control and high-quality synthesis. The project page is available at https://gulucaptain.github.io/DynamiCtrl/.

Pose-driven human-image animation diffusion models have shown remarkable capabilities in realistic human video synthesis. Despite the promising results achieved by previous approaches, challenges persist in achieving temporally consistent animation and ensuring robustness with off-the-shelf pose detectors. In this paper, we present TCAN, a pose-driven human image animation method that is robust to erroneous poses and consistent over time. In contrast to previous methods, we utilize the pre-trained ControlNet without fine-tuning to leverage its extensive pre-acquired knowledge from numerous pose-image-caption pairs. To keep the ControlNet frozen, we adapt LoRA to the UNet layers, enabling the network to align the latent space between the pose and appearance features. Additionally, by introducing an additional temporal layer to the ControlNet, we enhance robustness against outliers of the pose detector. Through the analysis of attention maps over the temporal axis, we also designed a novel temperature map leveraging pose information, allowing for a more static background. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve promising results in video synthesis tasks encompassing various poses, like chibi. Project Page: https://eccv2024tcan.github.io/

The emergence and popularity of facial deepfake methods spur the vigorous development of deepfake datasets and facial forgery detection, which to some extent alleviates the security concerns about facial-related artificial intelligence technologies. However, when it comes to human body forgery, there has been a persistent lack of datasets and detection methods, due to the later inception and complexity of human body generation methods. To mitigate this issue, we introduce TikTok-DeepFake (TT-DF), a novel large-scale diffusion-based dataset containing 6,120 forged videos with 1,378,857 synthetic frames, specifically tailored for body forgery detection. TT-DF offers a wide variety of forgery methods, involving multiple advanced human image animation models utilized for manipulation, two generative configurations based on the disentanglement of identity and pose information, as well as different compressed versions. The aim is to simulate any potential unseen forged data in the wild as comprehensively as possible, and we also furnish a benchmark on TT-DF. Additionally, we propose an adapted body forgery detection model, Temporal Optical Flow Network (TOF-Net), which exploits the spatiotemporal inconsistencies and optical flow distribution differences between natural data and forged data. Our experiments demonstrate that TOF-Net achieves favorable performance on TT-DF, outperforming current state-of-the-art extendable facial forgery detection models. For our TT-DF dataset, please refer to https://github.com/HashTAG00002/TT-DF.

In this work, we present DreamDance, a novel method for animating human images using only skeleton pose sequences as conditional inputs. Existing approaches struggle with generating coherent, high-quality content in an efficient and user-friendly manner. Concretely, baseline methods relying on only 2D pose guidance lack the cues of 3D information, leading to suboptimal results, while methods using 3D representation as guidance achieve higher quality but involve a cumbersome and time-intensive process. To address these limitations, DreamDance enriches 3D geometry cues from 2D poses by introducing an efficient diffusion model, enabling high-quality human image animation with various guidance. Our key insight is that human images naturally exhibit multiple levels of correlation, progressing from coarse skeleton poses to fine-grained geometry cues, and further from these geometry cues to explicit appearance details. Capturing such correlations could enrich the guidance signals, facilitating intra-frame coherency and inter-frame consistency. Specifically, we construct the TikTok-Dance5K dataset, comprising 5K high-quality dance videos with detailed frame annotations, including human pose, depth, and normal maps. Next, we introduce a Mutually Aligned Geometry Diffusion Model to generate fine-grained depth and normal maps for enriched guidance. Finally, a Cross-domain Controller incorporates multi-level guidance to animate human images effectively with a video diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in animating human images.

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/.

Diffusion-based human animation aims to animate a human character based on a source human image as well as driving signals such as a sequence of poses. Leveraging the generative capacity of diffusion model, existing approaches are able to generate high-fidelity poses, but struggle with significant viewpoint changes, especially in zoom-in/zoom-out scenarios where camera-character distance varies. This limits the applications such as cinematic shot type plan or camera control. We propose a pose-correlated reference selection diffusion network, supporting substantial viewpoint variations in human animation. Our key idea is to enable the network to utilize multiple reference images as input, since significant viewpoint changes often lead to missing appearance details on the human body. To eliminate the computational cost, we first introduce a novel pose correlation module to compute similarities between non-aligned target and source poses, and then propose an adaptive reference selection strategy, utilizing the attention map to identify key regions for animation generation. To train our model, we curated a large dataset from public TED talks featuring varied shots of the same character, helping the model learn synthesis for different perspectives. Our experimental results show that with the same number of reference images, our model performs favorably compared to the current SOTA methods under large viewpoint change. We further show that the adaptive reference selection is able to choose the most relevant reference regions to generate humans under free viewpoints.

Image animation consists of generating a video sequence so that an object in a source image is animated according to the motion of a driving video. Our framework addresses this problem without using any annotation or prior information about the specific object to animate. Once trained on a set of videos depicting objects of the same category (e.g. faces, human bodies), our method can be applied to any object of this class. To achieve this, we decouple appearance and motion information using a self-supervised formulation. To support complex motions, we use a representation consisting of a set of learned keypoints along with their local affine transformations. A generator network models occlusions arising during target motions and combines the appearance extracted from the source image and the motion derived from the driving video. Our framework scores best on diverse benchmarks and on a variety of object categories. Our source code is publicly available.

Character image animation, which generates high-quality videos from a reference image and target pose sequence, has seen significant progress in recent years. However, most existing methods only apply to human figures, which usually do not generalize well on anthropomorphic characters commonly used in industries like gaming and entertainment. Our in-depth analysis suggests to attribute this limitation to their insufficient modeling of motion, which is unable to comprehend the movement pattern of the driving video, thus imposing a pose sequence rigidly onto the target character. To this end, this paper proposes Animate-X, a universal animation framework based on LDM for various character types (collectively named X), including anthropomorphic characters. To enhance motion representation, we introduce the Pose Indicator, which captures comprehensive motion pattern from the driving video through both implicit and explicit manner. The former leverages CLIP visual features of a driving video to extract its gist of motion, like the overall movement pattern and temporal relations among motions, while the latter strengthens the generalization of LDM by simulating possible inputs in advance that may arise during inference. Moreover, we introduce a new Animated Anthropomorphic Benchmark (A^2Bench) to evaluate the performance of Animate-X on universal and widely applicable animation images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of Animate-X compared to state-of-the-art methods.

We present MOFA-Video, an advanced controllable image animation method that generates video from the given image using various additional controllable signals (such as human landmarks reference, manual trajectories, and another even provided video) or their combinations. This is different from previous methods which only can work on a specific motion domain or show weak control abilities with diffusion prior. To achieve our goal, we design several domain-aware motion field adapters (\ie, MOFA-Adapters) to control the generated motions in the video generation pipeline. For MOFA-Adapters, we consider the temporal motion consistency of the video and generate the dense motion flow from the given sparse control conditions first, and then, the multi-scale features of the given image are wrapped as a guided feature for stable video diffusion generation. We naively train two motion adapters for the manual trajectories and the human landmarks individually since they both contain sparse information about the control. After training, the MOFA-Adapters in different domains can also work together for more controllable video generation.

Character image animation, which generates high-quality videos from a reference image and target pose sequence, has seen significant progress in recent years. However, most existing methods only apply to human figures, which usually do not generalize well on anthropomorphic characters commonly used in industries like gaming and entertainment. Furthermore, previous methods could only generate videos with static backgrounds, which limits the realism of the videos. For the first challenge, our in-depth analysis suggests to attribute this limitation to their insufficient modeling of motion, which is unable to comprehend the movement pattern of the driving video, thus imposing a pose sequence rigidly onto the target character. To this end, this paper proposes Animate-X++, a universal animation framework based on DiT for various character types, including anthropomorphic characters. To enhance motion representation, we introduce the Pose Indicator, which captures comprehensive motion pattern from the driving video through both implicit and explicit manner. The former leverages CLIP visual features of a driving video to extract its gist of motion, like the overall movement pattern and temporal relations among motions, while the latter strengthens the generalization of DiT by simulating possible inputs in advance that may arise during inference. For the second challenge, we introduce a multi-task training strategy that jointly trains the animation and TI2V tasks. Combined with the proposed partial parameter training, this approach achieves not only character animation but also text-driven background dynamics, making the videos more realistic. Moreover, we introduce a new Animated Anthropomorphic Benchmark (A2Bench) to evaluate the performance of Animate-X++ on universal and widely applicable animation images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of Animate-X++.

Despite recent advances in image-to-video generation, better controllability and local animation are less explored. Most existing image-to-video methods are not locally aware and tend to move the entire scene. However, human artists may need to control the movement of different objects or regions. Additionally, current I2V methods require users not only to describe the target motion but also to provide redundant detailed descriptions of frame contents. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of current I2V tools. In this paper, we propose a practical framework, named Follow-Your-Click, to achieve image animation with a simple user click (for specifying what to move) and a short motion prompt (for specifying how to move). Technically, we propose the first-frame masking strategy, which significantly improves the video generation quality, and a motion-augmented module equipped with a short motion prompt dataset to improve the short prompt following abilities of our model. To further control the motion speed, we propose flow-based motion magnitude control to control the speed of target movement more precisely. Our framework has simpler yet precise user control and better generation performance than previous methods. Extensive experiments compared with 7 baselines, including both commercial tools and research methods on 8 metrics, suggest the superiority of our approach. Project Page: https://follow-your-click.github.io/

Audio-driven portrait animation has made significant advances with diffusion-based models, improving video quality and lipsync accuracy. However, the increasing complexity of these models has led to inefficiencies in training and inference, as well as constraints on video length and inter-frame continuity. In this paper, we propose JoyVASA, a diffusion-based method for generating facial dynamics and head motion in audio-driven facial animation. Specifically, in the first stage, we introduce a decoupled facial representation framework that separates dynamic facial expressions from static 3D facial representations. This decoupling allows the system to generate longer videos by combining any static 3D facial representation with dynamic motion sequences. Then, in the second stage, a diffusion transformer is trained to generate motion sequences directly from audio cues, independent of character identity. Finally, a generator trained in the first stage uses the 3D facial representation and the generated motion sequences as inputs to render high-quality animations. With the decoupled facial representation and the identity-independent motion generation process, JoyVASA extends beyond human portraits to animate animal faces seamlessly. The model is trained on a hybrid dataset of private Chinese and public English data, enabling multilingual support. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach. Future work will focus on improving real-time performance and refining expression control, further expanding the applications in portrait animation. The code is available at: https://github.com/jdh-algo/JoyVASA.

Image animation brings life to the static object in the source image according to the driving video. Recent works attempt to perform motion transfer on arbitrary objects through unsupervised methods without using a priori knowledge. However, it remains a significant challenge for current unsupervised methods when there is a large pose gap between the objects in the source and driving images. In this paper, a new end-to-end unsupervised motion transfer framework is proposed to overcome such issue. Firstly, we propose thin-plate spline motion estimation to produce a more flexible optical flow, which warps the feature maps of the source image to the feature domain of the driving image. Secondly, in order to restore the missing regions more realistically, we leverage multi-resolution occlusion masks to achieve more effective feature fusion. Finally, additional auxiliary loss functions are designed to ensure that there is a clear division of labor in the network modules, encouraging the network to generate high-quality images. Our method can animate a variety of objects, including talking faces, human bodies, and pixel animations. Experiments demonstrate that our method performs better on most benchmarks than the state of the art with visible improvements in pose-related metrics.

Image-to-video (I2V) generation tasks always suffer from keeping high fidelity in the open domains. Traditional image animation techniques primarily focus on specific domains such as faces or human poses, making them difficult to generalize to open domains. Several recent I2V frameworks based on diffusion models can generate dynamic content for open domain images but fail to maintain fidelity. We found that two main factors of low fidelity are the loss of image details and the noise prediction biases during the denoising process. To this end, we propose an effective method that can be applied to mainstream video diffusion models. This method achieves high fidelity based on supplementing more precise image information and noise rectification. Specifically, given a specified image, our method first adds noise to the input image latent to keep more details, then denoises the noisy latent with proper rectification to alleviate the noise prediction biases. Our method is tuning-free and plug-and-play. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the fidelity of generated videos. For more image-to-video generated results, please refer to the project website: https://noise-rectification.github.io.

We present X-Dancer, a novel zero-shot music-driven image animation pipeline that creates diverse and long-range lifelike human dance videos from a single static image. As its core, we introduce a unified transformer-diffusion framework, featuring an autoregressive transformer model that synthesize extended and music-synchronized token sequences for 2D body, head and hands poses, which then guide a diffusion model to produce coherent and realistic dance video frames. Unlike traditional methods that primarily generate human motion in 3D, X-Dancer addresses data limitations and enhances scalability by modeling a wide spectrum of 2D dance motions, capturing their nuanced alignment with musical beats through readily available monocular videos. To achieve this, we first build a spatially compositional token representation from 2D human pose labels associated with keypoint confidences, encoding both large articulated body movements (e.g., upper and lower body) and fine-grained motions (e.g., head and hands). We then design a music-to-motion transformer model that autoregressively generates music-aligned dance pose token sequences, incorporating global attention to both musical style and prior motion context. Finally we leverage a diffusion backbone to animate the reference image with these synthesized pose tokens through AdaIN, forming a fully differentiable end-to-end framework. Experimental results demonstrate that X-Dancer is able to produce both diverse and characterized dance videos, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art methods in term of diversity, expressiveness and realism. Code and model will be available for research purposes.

We propose a novel approach to animate human hair in a still portrait photo. Existing work has largely studied the animation of fluid elements such as water and fire. However, hair animation for a real image remains underexplored, which is a challenging problem, due to the high complexity of hair structure and dynamics. Considering the complexity of hair structure, we innovatively treat hair wisp extraction as an instance segmentation problem, where a hair wisp is referred to as an instance. With advanced instance segmentation networks, our method extracts meaningful and natural hair wisps. Furthermore, we propose a wisp-aware animation module that animates hair wisps with pleasing motions without noticeable artifacts. The extensive experiments show the superiority of our method. Our method provides the most pleasing and compelling viewing experience in the qualitative experiments and outperforms state-of-the-art still-image animation methods by a large margin in the quantitative evaluation. Project url: https://nevergiveu.github.io/AutomaticHairBlowing/

Single-image human reconstruction is vital for digital human modeling applications but remains an extremely challenging task. Current approaches rely on generative models to synthesize multi-view images for subsequent 3D reconstruction and animation. However, directly generating multiple views from a single human image suffers from geometric inconsistencies, resulting in issues like fragmented or blurred limbs in the reconstructed models. To tackle these limitations, we introduce HumanDreamer-X, a novel framework that integrates multi-view human generation and reconstruction into a unified pipeline, which significantly enhances the geometric consistency and visual fidelity of the reconstructed 3D models. In this framework, 3D Gaussian Splatting serves as an explicit 3D representation to provide initial geometry and appearance priority. Building upon this foundation, HumanFixer is trained to restore 3DGS renderings, which guarantee photorealistic results. Furthermore, we delve into the inherent challenges associated with attention mechanisms in multi-view human generation, and propose an attention modulation strategy that effectively enhances geometric details identity consistency across multi-view. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach markedly improves generation and reconstruction PSNR quality metrics by 16.45% and 12.65%, respectively, achieving a PSNR of up to 25.62 dB, while also showing generalization capabilities on in-the-wild data and applicability to various human reconstruction backbone models.

SmartAvatar is a vision-language-agent-driven framework for generating fully rigged, animation-ready 3D human avatars from a single photo or textual prompt. While diffusion-based methods have made progress in general 3D object generation, they continue to struggle with precise control over human identity, body shape, and animation readiness. In contrast, SmartAvatar leverages the commonsense reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (VLMs) in combination with off-the-shelf parametric human generators to deliver high-quality, customizable avatars. A key innovation is an autonomous verification loop, where the agent renders draft avatars, evaluates facial similarity, anatomical plausibility, and prompt alignment, and iteratively adjusts generation parameters for convergence. This interactive, AI-guided refinement process promotes fine-grained control over both facial and body features, enabling users to iteratively refine their avatars via natural-language conversations. Unlike diffusion models that rely on static pre-trained datasets and offer limited flexibility, SmartAvatar brings users into the modeling loop and ensures continuous improvement through an LLM-driven procedural generation and verification system. The generated avatars are fully rigged and support pose manipulation with consistent identity and appearance, making them suitable for downstream animation and interactive applications. Quantitative benchmarks and user studies demonstrate that SmartAvatar outperforms recent text- and image-driven avatar generation systems in terms of reconstructed mesh quality, identity fidelity, attribute accuracy, and animation readiness, making it a versatile tool for realistic, customizable avatar creation on consumer-grade hardware.

Close-proximity human-human interactive poses convey rich contextual information about interaction dynamics. Given such poses, humans can intuitively infer the context and anticipate possible past and future dynamics, drawing on strong priors of human behavior. Inspired by this observation, we propose Ponimator, a simple framework anchored on proximal interactive poses for versatile interaction animation. Our training data consists of close-contact two-person poses and their surrounding temporal context from motion-capture interaction datasets. Leveraging interactive pose priors, Ponimator employs two conditional diffusion models: (1) a pose animator that uses the temporal prior to generate dynamic motion sequences from interactive poses, and (2) a pose generator that applies the spatial prior to synthesize interactive poses from a single pose, text, or both when interactive poses are unavailable. Collectively, Ponimator supports diverse tasks, including image-based interaction animation, reaction animation, and text-to-interaction synthesis, facilitating the transfer of interaction knowledge from high-quality mocap data to open-world scenarios. Empirical experiments across diverse datasets and applications demonstrate the universality of the pose prior and the effectiveness and robustness of our framework.

Conditional human animation transforms a static reference image into a dynamic sequence by applying motion cues such as poses. These motion cues are typically derived from video data but are susceptible to limitations including low temporal resolution, motion blur, overexposure, and inaccuracies under low-light conditions. In contrast, event cameras provide data streams with exceptionally high temporal resolution, a wide dynamic range, and inherent resistance to motion blur and exposure issues. In this work, we propose EvAnimate, a framework that leverages event streams as motion cues to animate static human images. Our approach employs a specialized event representation that transforms asynchronous event streams into 3-channel slices with controllable slicing rates and appropriate slice density, ensuring compatibility with diffusion models. Subsequently, a dual-branch architecture generates high-quality videos by harnessing the inherent motion dynamics of the event streams, thereby enhancing both video quality and temporal consistency. Specialized data augmentation strategies further enhance cross-person generalization. Finally, we establish a new benchmarking, including simulated event data for training and validation, and a real-world event dataset capturing human actions under normal and extreme scenarios. The experiment results demonstrate that EvAnimate achieves high temporal fidelity and robust performance in scenarios where traditional video-derived cues fall short.

We present Disco4D, a novel Gaussian Splatting framework for 4D human generation and animation from a single image. Different from existing methods, Disco4D distinctively disentangles clothings (with Gaussian models) from the human body (with SMPL-X model), significantly enhancing the generation details and flexibility. It has the following technical innovations. 1) Disco4D learns to efficiently fit the clothing Gaussians over the SMPL-X Gaussians. 2) It adopts diffusion models to enhance the 3D generation process, e.g., modeling occluded parts not visible in the input image. 3) It learns an identity encoding for each clothing Gaussian to facilitate the separation and extraction of clothing assets. Furthermore, Disco4D naturally supports 4D human animation with vivid dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of Disco4D on 4D human generation and animation tasks. Our visualizations can be found in https://disco-4d.github.io/.

Human animation from a single reference image shall be flexible to synthesize whole-body motion for either a headshot or whole-body portrait, where the motions are readily controlled by audio signal and text prompts. This is hard for most existing methods as they only support producing pre-specified head or half-body motion aligned with audio inputs. In this paper, we propose a versatile human animation method, i.e., VersaAnimator, which generates whole-body talking human from arbitrary portrait images, not only driven by audio signal but also flexibly controlled by text prompts. Specifically, we design a text-controlled, audio-driven motion generator that produces whole-body motion representations in 3D synchronized with audio inputs while following textual motion descriptions. To promote natural smooth motion, we propose a code-pose translation module to link VAE codebooks with 2D DWposes extracted from template videos. Moreover, we introduce a multi-modal video diffusion that generates photorealistic human animation from a reference image according to both audio inputs and whole-body motion representations. Extensive experiments show that VersaAnimator outperforms existing methods in visual quality, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization.

Recent advances in video diffusion models have significantly improved character animation techniques. However, current approaches rely on basic structural conditions such as DWPose or SMPL-X to animate character images, limiting their effectiveness in open-domain scenarios with dynamic backgrounds or challenging human poses. In this paper, we introduce AniCrafter, a diffusion-based human-centric animation model that can seamlessly integrate and animate a given character into open-domain dynamic backgrounds while following given human motion sequences. Built on cutting-edge Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion architectures, our model incorporates an innovative "avatar-background" conditioning mechanism that reframes open-domain human-centric animation as a restoration task, enabling more stable and versatile animation outputs. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Codes will be available at https://github.com/MyNiuuu/AniCrafter.

Text-guided human motion generation has drawn significant interest because of its impactful applications spanning animation and robotics. Recently, application of diffusion models for motion generation has enabled improvements in the quality of generated motions. However, existing approaches are limited by their reliance on relatively small-scale motion capture data, leading to poor performance on more diverse, in-the-wild prompts. In this paper, we introduce Make-An-Animation, a text-conditioned human motion generation model which learns more diverse poses and prompts from large-scale image-text datasets, enabling significant improvement in performance over prior works. Make-An-Animation is trained in two stages. First, we train on a curated large-scale dataset of (text, static pseudo-pose) pairs extracted from image-text datasets. Second, we fine-tune on motion capture data, adding additional layers to model the temporal dimension. Unlike prior diffusion models for motion generation, Make-An-Animation uses a U-Net architecture similar to recent text-to-video generation models. Human evaluation of motion realism and alignment with input text shows that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on text-to-motion generation.

Existing Human NeRF methods for reconstructing 3D humans typically rely on multiple 2D images from multi-view cameras or monocular videos captured from fixed camera views. However, in real-world scenarios, human images are often captured from random camera angles, presenting challenges for high-quality 3D human reconstruction. In this paper, we propose SHERF, the first generalizable Human NeRF model for recovering animatable 3D humans from a single input image. SHERF extracts and encodes 3D human representations in canonical space, enabling rendering and animation from free views and poses. To achieve high-fidelity novel view and pose synthesis, the encoded 3D human representations should capture both global appearance and local fine-grained textures. To this end, we propose a bank of 3D-aware hierarchical features, including global, point-level, and pixel-aligned features, to facilitate informative encoding. Global features enhance the information extracted from the single input image and complement the information missing from the partial 2D observation. Point-level features provide strong clues of 3D human structure, while pixel-aligned features preserve more fine-grained details. To effectively integrate the 3D-aware hierarchical feature bank, we design a feature fusion transformer. Extensive experiments on THuman, RenderPeople, ZJU_MoCap, and HuMMan datasets demonstrate that SHERF achieves state-of-the-art performance, with better generalizability for novel view and pose synthesis.

End-to-end human animation with rich multi-modal conditions, e.g., text, image and audio has achieved remarkable advancements in recent years. However, most existing methods could only animate a single subject and inject conditions in a global manner, ignoring scenarios that multiple concepts could appears in the same video with rich human-human interactions and human-object interactions. Such global assumption prevents precise and per-identity control of multiple concepts including humans and objects, therefore hinders applications. In this work, we discard the single-entity assumption and introduce a novel framework that enforces strong, region-specific binding of conditions from modalities to each identity's spatiotemporal footprint. Given reference images of multiple concepts, our method could automatically infer layout information by leveraging a mask predictor to match appearance cues between the denoised video and each reference appearance. Furthermore, we inject local audio condition into its corresponding region to ensure layout-aligned modality matching in a iterative manner. This design enables the high-quality generation of controllable multi-concept human-centric videos. Empirical results and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our explicit layout control for multi-modal conditions compared to implicit counterparts and other existing methods.

We introduce a method to generate temporally coherent human animation from a single image, a video, or a random noise. This problem has been formulated as modeling of an auto-regressive generation, i.e., to regress past frames to decode future frames. However, such unidirectional generation is highly prone to motion drifting over time, generating unrealistic human animation with significant artifacts such as appearance distortion. We claim that bidirectional temporal modeling enforces temporal coherence on a generative network by largely suppressing the motion ambiguity of human appearance. To prove our claim, we design a novel human animation framework using a denoising diffusion model: a neural network learns to generate the image of a person by denoising temporal Gaussian noises whose intermediate results are cross-conditioned bidirectionally between consecutive frames. In the experiments, our method demonstrates strong performance compared to existing unidirectional approaches with realistic temporal coherence.

Audio-driven human animation models often suffer from identity drift during temporal autoregressive generation, where characters gradually lose their identity over time. One solution is to generate keyframes as intermediate temporal anchors that prevent degradation, but this requires an additional keyframe generation stage and can restrict natural motion dynamics. To address this, we propose Lookahead Anchoring, which leverages keyframes from future timesteps ahead of the current generation window, rather than within it. This transforms keyframes from fixed boundaries into directional beacons: the model continuously pursues these future anchors while responding to immediate audio cues, maintaining consistent identity through persistent guidance. This also enables self-keyframing, where the reference image serves as the lookahead target, eliminating the need for keyframe generation entirely. We find that the temporal lookahead distance naturally controls the balance between expressivity and consistency: larger distances allow for greater motion freedom, while smaller ones strengthen identity adherence. When applied to three recent human animation models, Lookahead Anchoring achieves superior lip synchronization, identity preservation, and visual quality, demonstrating improved temporal conditioning across several different architectures. Video results are available at the following link: https://lookahead-anchoring.github.io.

Character Animation aims to generating character videos from still images through driving signals. Currently, diffusion models have become the mainstream in visual generation research, owing to their robust generative capabilities. However, challenges persist in the realm of image-to-video, especially in character animation, where temporally maintaining consistency with detailed information from character remains a formidable problem. In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion models and propose a novel framework tailored for character animation. To preserve consistency of intricate appearance features from reference image, we design ReferenceNet to merge detail features via spatial attention. To ensure controllability and continuity, we introduce an efficient pose guider to direct character's movements and employ an effective temporal modeling approach to ensure smooth inter-frame transitions between video frames. By expanding the training data, our approach can animate arbitrary characters, yielding superior results in character animation compared to other image-to-video methods. Furthermore, we evaluate our method on benchmarks for fashion video and human dance synthesis, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in audio-driven human animation. However, critical challenges remain in (i) generating highly dynamic videos while preserving character consistency, (ii) achieving precise emotion alignment between characters and audio, and (iii) enabling multi-character audio-driven animation. To address these challenges, we propose HunyuanVideo-Avatar, a multimodal diffusion transformer (MM-DiT)-based model capable of simultaneously generating dynamic, emotion-controllable, and multi-character dialogue videos. Concretely, HunyuanVideo-Avatar introduces three key innovations: (i) A character image injection module is designed to replace the conventional addition-based character conditioning scheme, eliminating the inherent condition mismatch between training and inference. This ensures the dynamic motion and strong character consistency; (ii) An Audio Emotion Module (AEM) is introduced to extract and transfer the emotional cues from an emotion reference image to the target generated video, enabling fine-grained and accurate emotion style control; (iii) A Face-Aware Audio Adapter (FAA) is proposed to isolate the audio-driven character with latent-level face mask, enabling independent audio injection via cross-attention for multi-character scenarios. These innovations empower HunyuanVideo-Avatar to surpass state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and a newly proposed wild dataset, generating realistic avatars in dynamic, immersive scenarios.

Creating a high-fidelity, animatable 3D full-body avatar from a single image is a challenging task due to the diverse appearance and poses of humans and the limited availability of high-quality training data. To achieve fast and high-quality human reconstruction, this work rethinks the task from the perspectives of dataset, model, and representation. First, we introduce a large-scale HUman-centric GEnerated dataset, HuGe100K, consisting of 100K diverse, photorealistic sets of human images. Each set contains 24-view frames in specific human poses, generated using a pose-controllable image-to-multi-view model. Next, leveraging the diversity in views, poses, and appearances within HuGe100K, we develop a scalable feed-forward transformer model to predict a 3D human Gaussian representation in a uniform space from a given human image. This model is trained to disentangle human pose, body shape, clothing geometry, and texture. The estimated Gaussians can be animated without post-processing. We conduct comprehensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset and method. Our model demonstrates the ability to efficiently reconstruct photorealistic humans at 1K resolution from a single input image using a single GPU instantly. Additionally, it seamlessly supports various applications, as well as shape and texture editing tasks.

End-to-end human animation, such as audio-driven talking human generation, has undergone notable advancements in the recent few years. However, existing methods still struggle to scale up as large general video generation models, limiting their potential in real applications. In this paper, we propose OmniHuman, a Diffusion Transformer-based framework that scales up data by mixing motion-related conditions into the training phase. To this end, we introduce two training principles for these mixed conditions, along with the corresponding model architecture and inference strategy. These designs enable OmniHuman to fully leverage data-driven motion generation, ultimately achieving highly realistic human video generation. More importantly, OmniHuman supports various portrait contents (face close-up, portrait, half-body, full-body), supports both talking and singing, handles human-object interactions and challenging body poses, and accommodates different image styles. Compared to existing end-to-end audio-driven methods, OmniHuman not only produces more realistic videos, but also offers greater flexibility in inputs. It also supports multiple driving modalities (audio-driven, video-driven and combined driving signals). Video samples are provided on the ttfamily project page (https://omnihuman-lab.github.io)

Existing methods for image-to-3D avatar generation struggle to produce highly detailed, animation-ready avatars suitable for real-world applications. We introduce AdaHuman, a novel framework that generates high-fidelity animatable 3D avatars from a single in-the-wild image. AdaHuman incorporates two key innovations: (1) A pose-conditioned 3D joint diffusion model that synthesizes consistent multi-view images in arbitrary poses alongside corresponding 3D Gaussian Splats (3DGS) reconstruction at each diffusion step; (2) A compositional 3DGS refinement module that enhances the details of local body parts through image-to-image refinement and seamlessly integrates them using a novel crop-aware camera ray map, producing a cohesive detailed 3D avatar. These components allow AdaHuman to generate highly realistic standardized A-pose avatars with minimal self-occlusion, enabling rigging and animation with any input motion. Extensive evaluation on public benchmarks and in-the-wild images demonstrates that AdaHuman significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both avatar reconstruction and reposing. Code and models will be publicly available for research purposes.

Generating animatable human avatars from a single image is essential for various digital human modeling applications. Existing 3D reconstruction methods often struggle to capture fine details in animatable models, while generative approaches for controllable animation, though avoiding explicit 3D modeling, suffer from viewpoint inconsistencies in extreme poses and computational inefficiencies. In this paper, we address these challenges by leveraging the power of generative models to produce detailed multi-view canonical pose images, which help resolve ambiguities in animatable human reconstruction. We then propose a robust method for 3D reconstruction of inconsistent images, enabling real-time rendering during inference. Specifically, we adapt a transformer-based video generation model to generate multi-view canonical pose images and normal maps, pretraining on a large-scale video dataset to improve generalization. To handle view inconsistencies, we recast the reconstruction problem as a 4D task and introduce an efficient 3D modeling approach using 4D Gaussian Splatting. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves photorealistic, real-time animation of 3D human avatars from in-the-wild images, showcasing its effectiveness and generalization capability.

Structured representations such as keypoints are widely used in pose transfer, conditional image generation, animation, and 3D reconstruction. However, their supervised learning requires expensive annotation for each target domain. We propose a self-supervised method that learns to disentangle object structure from the appearance with a graph of 2D keypoints linked by straight edges. Both the keypoint location and their pairwise edge weights are learned, given only a collection of images depicting the same object class. The resulting graph is interpretable, for example, AutoLink recovers the human skeleton topology when applied to images showing people. Our key ingredients are i) an encoder that predicts keypoint locations in an input image, ii) a shared graph as a latent variable that links the same pairs of keypoints in every image, iii) an intermediate edge map that combines the latent graph edge weights and keypoint locations in a soft, differentiable manner, and iv) an inpainting objective on randomly masked images. Although simpler, AutoLink outperforms existing self-supervised methods on the established keypoint and pose estimation benchmarks and paves the way for structure-conditioned generative models on more diverse datasets. Project website: https://xingzhehe.github.io/autolink/.

We present a multilinear statistical model of the human tongue that captures anatomical and tongue pose related shape variations separately. The model is derived from 3D magnetic resonance imaging data of 11 speakers sustaining speech related vocal tract configurations. The extraction is performed by using a minimally supervised method that uses as basis an image segmentation approach and a template fitting technique. Furthermore, it uses image denoising to deal with possibly corrupt data, palate surface information reconstruction to handle palatal tongue contacts, and a bootstrap strategy to refine the obtained shapes. Our evaluation concludes that limiting the degrees of freedom for the anatomical and speech related variations to 5 and 4, respectively, produces a model that can reliably register unknown data while avoiding overfitting effects. Furthermore, we show that it can be used to generate a plausible tongue animation by tracking sparse motion capture data.

Reconstructing a high-quality, animatable 3D human avatar with expressive facial and hand motions from a single image has gained significant attention due to its broad application potential. 3D human avatar reconstruction typically requires multi-view or monocular videos and training on individual IDs, which is both complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, limited by SMPLX's expressiveness, these methods often focus on body motion but struggle with facial expressions. To address these challenges, we first introduce an expressive human model (EHM) to enhance facial expression capabilities and develop an accurate tracking method. Based on this template model, we propose GUAVA, the first framework for fast animatable upper-body 3D Gaussian avatar reconstruction. We leverage inverse texture mapping and projection sampling techniques to infer Ubody (upper-body) Gaussians from a single image. The rendered images are refined through a neural refiner. Experimental results demonstrate that GUAVA significantly outperforms previous methods in rendering quality and offers significant speed improvements, with reconstruction times in the sub-second range (0.1s), and supports real-time animation and rendering.

Generative models have recently exhibited exceptional capabilities in various scenarios, for example, image generation based on text description. In this work, we focus on the task of generating a series of coherent image sequence based on a given storyline, denoted as open-ended visual storytelling. We make the following three contributions: (i) to fulfill the task of visual storytelling, we introduce two modules into a pre-trained stable diffusion model, and construct an auto-regressive image generator, termed as StoryGen, that enables to generate the current frame by conditioning on both a text prompt and a preceding frame; (ii) to train our proposed model, we collect paired image and text samples by sourcing from various online sources, such as videos, E-books, and establish a data processing pipeline for constructing a diverse dataset, named StorySalon, with a far larger vocabulary than existing animation-specific datasets; (iii) we adopt a three-stage curriculum training strategy, that enables style transfer, visual context conditioning, and human feedback alignment, respectively. Quantitative experiments and human evaluation have validated the superiority of our proposed model, in terms of image quality, style consistency, content consistency, and visual-language alignment. We will make the code, model, and dataset publicly available to the research community.

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.

Despite recent progress, video generative models still struggle to animate static images into videos that portray delicate human actions, particularly when handling uncommon or novel actions whose training data are limited. In this paper, we explore the task of learning to animate images to portray delicate human actions using a small number of videos -- 16 or fewer -- which is highly valuable for real-world applications like video and movie production. Learning generalizable motion patterns that smoothly transition from user-provided reference images in a few-shot setting is highly challenging. We propose FLASH (Few-shot Learning to Animate and Steer Humans), which learns generalizable motion patterns by forcing the model to reconstruct a video using the motion features and cross-frame correspondences of another video with the same motion but different appearance. This encourages transferable motion learning and mitigates overfitting to limited training data. Additionally, FLASH extends the decoder with additional layers to propagate details from the reference image to generated frames, improving transition smoothness. Human judges overwhelmingly favor FLASH, with 65.78\% of 488 responses prefer FLASH over baselines. We strongly recommend watching the videos in the website: https://lihaoxin05.github.io/human_action_animation/, as motion artifacts are hard to notice from images.

We present a novel method for reconstructing personalized 3D human avatars with realistic animation from only a few images. Due to the large variations in body shapes, poses, and cloth types, existing methods mostly require hours of per-subject optimization during inference, which limits their practical applications. In contrast, we learn a universal prior from over a thousand clothed humans to achieve instant feedforward generation and zero-shot generalization. Specifically, instead of rigging the avatar with shared skinning weights, we jointly infer personalized avatar shape, skinning weights, and pose-dependent deformations, which effectively improves overall geometric fidelity and reduces deformation artifacts. Moreover, to normalize pose variations and resolve coupled ambiguity between canonical shapes and skinning weights, we design a 3D canonicalization process to produce pixel-aligned initial conditions, which helps to reconstruct fine-grained geometric details. We then propose a multi-frame feature aggregation to robustly reduce artifacts introduced in canonicalization and fuse a plausible avatar preserving person-specific identities. Finally, we train the model in an end-to-end framework on a large-scale capture dataset, which contains diverse human subjects paired with high-quality 3D scans. Extensive experiments show that our method generates more authentic reconstruction and animation than state-of-the-arts, and can be directly generalized to inputs from casually taken phone photos. Project page and code is available at https://github.com/rongakowang/FRESA.

Reconstructing the human body from single-view videos plays a pivotal role in the virtual reality domain. One prevalent application scenario necessitates the rapid reconstruction of high-fidelity 3D digital humans while simultaneously ensuring real-time rendering and interaction. Existing methods often struggle to fulfill both requirements. In this paper, we introduce Human101, a novel framework adept at producing high-fidelity dynamic 3D human reconstructions from 1-view videos by training 3D Gaussians in 100 seconds and rendering in 100+ FPS. Our method leverages the strengths of 3D Gaussian Splatting, which provides an explicit and efficient representation of 3D humans. Standing apart from prior NeRF-based pipelines, Human101 ingeniously applies a Human-centric Forward Gaussian Animation method to deform the parameters of 3D Gaussians, thereby enhancing rendering speed (i.e., rendering 1024-resolution images at an impressive 60+ FPS and rendering 512-resolution images at 100+ FPS). Experimental results indicate that our approach substantially eclipses current methods, clocking up to a 10 times surge in frames per second and delivering comparable or superior rendering quality. Code and demos will be released at https://github.com/longxiang-ai/Human101.

Recent advances in neural radiance fields enable novel view synthesis of photo-realistic images in dynamic settings, which can be applied to scenarios with human animation. Commonly used implicit backbones to establish accurate models, however, require many input views and additional annotations such as human masks, UV maps and depth maps. In this work, we propose ParDy-Human (Parameterized Dynamic Human Avatar), a fully explicit approach to construct a digital avatar from as little as a single monocular sequence. ParDy-Human introduces parameter-driven dynamics into 3D Gaussian Splatting where 3D Gaussians are deformed by a human pose model to animate the avatar. Our method is composed of two parts: A first module that deforms canonical 3D Gaussians according to SMPL vertices and a consecutive module that further takes their designed joint encodings and predicts per Gaussian deformations to deal with dynamics beyond SMPL vertex deformations. Images are then synthesized by a rasterizer. ParDy-Human constitutes an explicit model for realistic dynamic human avatars which requires significantly fewer training views and images. Our avatars learning is free of additional annotations such as masks and can be trained with variable backgrounds while inferring full-resolution images efficiently even on consumer hardware. We provide experimental evidence to show that ParDy-Human outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ZJU-MoCap and THUman4.0 datasets both quantitatively and visually.

Although LEGO sets have entertained generations of children and adults, the challenge of designing customized builds matching the complexity of real-world or imagined scenes remains too great for the average enthusiast. In order to make this feat possible, we implement a system that generates a LEGO brick model from 2D images. We design a novel solution to this problem that uses an octree-structured autoencoder trained on 3D voxelized models to obtain a feasible latent representation for model reconstruction, and a separate network trained to predict this latent representation from 2D images. LEGO models are obtained by algorithmic conversion of the 3D voxelized model to bricks. We demonstrate first-of-its-kind conversion of photographs to 3D LEGO models. An octree architecture enables the flexibility to produce multiple resolutions to best fit a user's creative vision or design needs. In order to demonstrate the broad applicability of our system, we generate step-by-step building instructions and animations for LEGO models of objects and human faces. Finally, we test these automatically generated LEGO sets by constructing physical builds using real LEGO bricks.

Animating a still image offers an engaging visual experience. Traditional image animation techniques mainly focus on animating natural scenes with stochastic dynamics (e.g. clouds and fluid) or domain-specific motions (e.g. human hair or body motions), and thus limits their applicability to more general visual content. To overcome this limitation, we explore the synthesis of dynamic content for open-domain images, converting them into animated videos. The key idea is to utilize the motion prior of text-to-video diffusion models by incorporating the image into the generative process as guidance. Given an image, we first project it into a text-aligned rich context representation space using a query transformer, which facilitates the video model to digest the image content in a compatible fashion. However, some visual details still struggle to be preserved in the resultant videos. To supplement with more precise image information, we further feed the full image to the diffusion model by concatenating it with the initial noises. Experimental results show that our proposed method can produce visually convincing and more logical & natural motions, as well as higher conformity to the input image. Comparative evaluation demonstrates the notable superiority of our approach over existing competitors.

Generating high fidelity human video with specified identities has attracted significant attention in the content generation community. However, existing techniques struggle to strike a balance between training efficiency and identity preservation, either requiring tedious case-by-case finetuning or usually missing the identity details in video generation process. In this study, we present ID-Animator, a zero-shot human-video generation approach that can perform personalized video generation given single reference facial image without further training. ID-Animator inherits existing diffusion-based video generation backbones with a face adapter to encode the ID-relevant embeddings from learnable facial latent queries. To facilitate the extraction of identity information in video generation, we introduce an ID-oriented dataset construction pipeline, which incorporates decoupled human attribute and action captioning technique from a constructed facial image pool. Based on this pipeline, a random face reference training method is further devised to precisely capture the ID-relevant embeddings from reference images, thus improving the fidelity and generalization capacity of our model for ID-specific video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of ID-Animator to generate personalized human videos over previous models. Moreover, our method is highly compatible with popular pre-trained T2V models like animatediff and various community backbone models, showing high extendability in real-world applications for video generation where identity preservation is highly desired. Our codes and checkpoints will be released at https://github.com/ID-Animator/ID-Animator.

In this paper, we propose ARCH (Animatable Reconstruction of Clothed Humans), a novel end-to-end framework for accurate reconstruction of animation-ready 3D clothed humans from a monocular image. Existing approaches to digitize 3D humans struggle to handle pose variations and recover details. Also, they do not produce models that are animation ready. In contrast, ARCH is a learned pose-aware model that produces detailed 3D rigged full-body human avatars from a single unconstrained RGB image. A Semantic Space and a Semantic Deformation Field are created using a parametric 3D body estimator. They allow the transformation of 2D/3D clothed humans into a canonical space, reducing ambiguities in geometry caused by pose variations and occlusions in training data. Detailed surface geometry and appearance are learned using an implicit function representation with spatial local features. Furthermore, we propose additional per-pixel supervision on the 3D reconstruction using opacity-aware differentiable rendering. Our experiments indicate that ARCH increases the fidelity of the reconstructed humans. We obtain more than 50% lower reconstruction errors for standard metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods on public datasets. We also show numerous qualitative examples of animated, high-quality reconstructed avatars unseen in the literature so far.