Papers for

animation studios

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Contact guided retargeting preserves human object interactions on diverse characters

ReCHOIR: Contact-guided Human Object Interaction Retargeting to Diverse Characters

Abstract: We present ReCHOIR, a novel contact-guided motion retargeting method for transferring human object interaction (HOI) motions across diverse humanoid characters. Unlike prior motion retargeting methods that primarily focus on transferring human motion alone, our goal is to preserve not only the semantics of the original body movement but also consistent interaction between the character and the manipulated object, while jointly producing aligned target human and object motions. Given source HOI motion, object geometry, and contact cues extracted from the source interaction, ReCHOIR retargets an HOI sequence to target characters with different skeletal configurations while maintaining both motion semantics and contact-consistent interaction patterns. Our method builds on a Part-Aware Motion Embedding (PAME) autoencoder, which encodes full-body motion into a shared body-part-wise latent space. This representation enables generalization across heterogeneous skeletons while preserving local motion semantics beneficial for part-aware adaptation in HOI retargeting. On top of this representation, we introduce a contact-guided retargeting module and an object motion decoder for HOI retargeting. The contact-guided retargeting module treats the source object interaction as a condition for refining target character motion: object- and contact-related signals are encoded into a body-part-aligned latent representation and injected into decoding through a residual control branch, enabling stronger adaptation in interaction-relevant body regions without discarding the underlying motion prior. In parallel, the object motion decoder predicts a target object motion aligned with the refined target character motion, ensuring that the object trajectory remains consistent with how the interaction is realized by the target character.

Thu 10 SeptGraphics
The gist
When people move and interact with objects, their motions and how they touch those objects matter. The authors created a system called ReCHOIR that can take a recorded human movement with object use and adapt it so different virtual characters perform it naturally. Their method keeps the important body movements and the contact with the object consistent, even if the new character's body is quite different. This helps make animations where characters of different shapes can interact with objects realistically.
Open 2609.10982v1

Video generation models improved by balancing temporal state transport

Temporal State Transport in Video Generation: Diagnosing and Correcting Spectral Imbalance

Abstract: Reliable video generation requires more than high-quality frames to form a coherent story: a model must maintain a persistent state, transporting visual attributes such as identity, scene layout, motion, and fine details across time. Existing training-free methods mainly strengthen cross-frame attention or analyze local attention entropy, but these views do not reveal whether temporal interactions stay in a healthy transport regime. In this work, we study video generation through the perspective of Temporal State Transport. We introduce Spectral Tension, a signed diagnostic that compares local attention diffuseness with global spectral diversity, and use it to identify two opposite temporal failures: fragmented transport and over-mixing hotspots. Based on this diagnosis, we propose Spectral Transport Homeostasis, a training-free regulator that softly corrects pathological temporal states while largely preserving balanced ones. Experiments on pretrained video generation models show that the original model often occupies imbalanced temporal regimes, whereas our method selectively applies larger corrections to the worst temporal hotspots and improves temporal consistency and visual quality without finetuning. Code: https://github.com/lytang63/temporal-state-transport

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
The gist
Creating videos with AI requires keeping track of how things change and stay the same over time, like a person's identity or motions. The authors found that existing methods miss when this tracking goes wrong, causing either jumbled or overly mixed frame details. They introduced a new way to measure these problems and a way to fix them without retraining the model. This fix improves the smoothness and quality of AI-generated videos by focusing corrections only on the most problematic parts.
Open 2609.08505v1