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.
Wizard enables real time control of game worlds with diverse characters
Wizard: Manipulate Any World in Real Time via Agentic Control
Abstract: Recent advances in video world models have enabled the generation of increasingly realistic and interactive virtual environments, opening new possibilities for player-customizable gameplay. Agentic frameworks further advance this direction by decoupling explicit game logic and controllable world representations from visual generation. However, existing approaches support only simple game settings and predefined motion patterns, generalize poorly to unseen environments and characters, and offer limited real-time interactivity. In this paper, we introduce Wizard, an agentic game world model that enables real-time, precise control over character motions while generalizing zero-shot across novel scenes, characters, and actions. To achieve this, we construct a diverse dataset spanning 750 scenes and 178 characters, incorporating skeleton and geometry information as structured representations. We leverage these representations as intermediate proxies to condition a video generation model, together with an adaptive masking mechanism that improves alignment between the conditioning signals and generated video rollouts. Furthermore, we introduce an agentic framework that explicitly maintains and updates game states, allowing players to freely configure their virtual worlds and exercise fine-grained control over character motions while preserving visual quality and gameplay consistency. By combining agentic control with structured proxy-based generation, our framework unlocks new possibilities for player-driven game creation with real-time, generalizable, and mechanically consistent world simulation.
MorphSIG improves subject consistency in image generation with new feature transport
MorphSIG: Subject-Driven Image Generation via Decoupled Anchoring and Feature Transport
Abstract: We propose MorphSIG, a training-free framework that reformulates subject-driven image generation (SIG) as pseudo-video feature transport. MorphSIG contains two core modules: Progressive Decoupled Anchoring, which uses frequency-domain decoupling and structural scrambling during early denoising to break structural locking and enable a gradual transition from free composition to identity alignment; and Pseudo-flow Guided Feature Transport, which constructs a latent-space pseudo-flow field to mimic Image-to-Video temporal coherence and transport subject semantics precisely. To address stylistic homogeneity and the lack of ground truth in existing benchmarks, we further introduce a benchmark with diverse stylized subjects. Extensive experiments show that MorphSIG significantly improves pose diversity and subject fidelity over baselines without additional training. Overall, MorphSIG bridges static generation and dynamic propagation, providing a cost-effective paradigm for high-fidelity subject consistency.
Efficient motion generation for varied skeletons using sparse learning
ETA-Motion: Efficient Topology-Agnostic Motion Diffusion via Sparse Joint Learning
Abstract: Topology-agnostic motion generation aims to synthesize motions for diverse characters with arbitrary skeletons. Unlike conventional motion generation, which assumes a fixed skeletal template, this setting must handle diverse joint configurations and inconsistent joint semantics across characters. Existing methods address this challenge through dense full-joint modeling, which incurs substantial computational cost and hinders learning transferable motion patterns across diverse skeletal topologies. We present ETA-Motion, a topology-agnostic motion generation framework based on sparse joint learning. Instead of learning motion from all joints, our method uses a compact subset of joints to reduce redundancy and trains the motion generator on the resulting sparse skeleton. To facilitate correspondence across diverse topologies, we introduce semantic joint embeddings that combine textual and visual cues, together with topology-aware training objectives for preserving skeletal structure. Although ETA-Motion is trained only on sparse skeletal observations, it supports full-skeleton motion generation during inference. Experimental results demonstrate that ETA-Motion outperforms existing topology-agnostic baselines while significantly improving efficiency and generalization to unseen motions and unseen topologies.
Humanoid robots mimic human interactions from wild videos
Mimetic Embodiment Transfer of Human-Humanoid Interaction from In-the-Wild Videos
Abstract: Enabling a humanoid to interact naturally with human partners requires preserving not only individual motions but also the spatial, semantic, and contact relationships underlying the interaction (i.e., hugging, dancing, hand-shaking, etc.). Furthermore, a practical solution should generalize across various humanoid embodiments with distinct morphologies and kinematic constraints. To tackle this challenge, we propose HumiTransfer, a mimetic embodiment transfer framework that converts in-the-wild human-human interaction videos into physically plausible human-humanoid interactions. HumiTransfer first reconstructs 3D human motion with consistent foot-ground contact, then transfers one participant to a target humanoid embodiment via interaction modeling, using weighted joint-relative directions and anatomical offsets to prioritize interaction-critical inter-body relationships, while post-retargeting optimization enforces balance, contact, and collision avoidance. Subsequently, we apply HumiTransfer to 1,200 in-the-wild videos, producing approximately 500,000 frames of diverse interactions for the 26-DoF Unitree R1 Edu and the 23-DoF HighTorque Mini-hi humanoid robot, resulting in our HumiMimic dataset. Across both robots, HumiTransfer achieves superior motion fidelity, preserves inter-body relationships, and maintains contact accuracy compared with existing baselines. Moreover, we demonstrate that HumiMimic supports motion generation methods for synthesizing interactive humanoid motions following a human partner. Finally, our real robot deployments confirm the physical executability of the transferred motions in real-world settings.
Self supervised training improves few step video diffusion models
Beyond Distribution Matching: Self-Supervised Representation Forcing for Few-Step Video Generation
Abstract: Few-step distillation is essential for deploying modern video diffusion models. Among existing approaches, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) has emerged as a highly promising paradigm by achieving strong output-space fidelity without adversarial training, while remaining flexible across various student architectures. We observe, however, that DMD fundamentally relies on an output-space objective, lacking explicit regularization on the model's internal representations. As the distillation step count aggressively shrinks, this output-only supervision becomes insufficient, causing the distilled student to degrade in both fine-grained spatial structures and coherent temporal dynamics. To address this limitation, we introduce Self Flow Forcing (SF$^2$), which incorporates a predictive representation loss into the DMD framework without altering its output objective. By providing the student and an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) teacher with heterogeneous noise levels, we establish an information asymmetry. This formulation forces the student to predict the teacher's internal representations from a more corrupted input, effectively integrating self-supervised representation alignment into distribution matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SF$^2$ effectively mitigates temporal flickering and consistently improves both spatial fidelity and motion quality. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism is architecture-agnostic - seamlessly supporting both bidirectional and causal models - and requires no external feature extractors, introducing minimal computational overhead.
MimicAll enables motion tracking across different humanoid robots
MimicAll: Structured Embodiment Conditioning for Cross-Humanoid Whole-Body Motion Tracking
Abstract: Humanoid motion trackers reproduce diverse behaviors, but sharing a policy across bodies requires accounting for differences in structure, morphology and dynamics. We present MimicAll, a reinforcement-learning framework for shared whole-body motion tracking across heterogeneous humanoids. A structured embodiment descriptor is encoded into global and joint-aligned conditions, which are combined with observation history and body-matched motion references to predict joint-target offsets. Physics-consistent embodiment randomization, body-calibrated retargeting and heterogeneous simulation support training across 4,096 variants from 16 humanoid families. We introduce a benchmark of 464 bodies across five distribution strata to evaluate motion generalization, within-family embodiment shifts and unseen-family transfer. Controlled ablations show that embodiment information improves motion completion with simple concatenation, while self-attention yields the lowest global position errors. With equal training transitions, shared training achieves 99.4% 30-second success on randomized G1 bodies in 100STYLE, versus 42.9% for a single-body specialist. With Flat-MLP encoding and concatenation, continued training on a motion subset excluding obstacle categories achieves 98.3% and 93.5% 30-second success on 100STYLE for sampled training bodies and out-of-distribution variants within seen families, respectively. On an eight-motion LAFAN1 subset excluding ground and get-up sequences across 464 bodies, mismatched body conditions reduce self-attention's 30-second success from 61.7% to 47.0%, demonstrating a closed-loop benefit from embodiment information.
Explicit friction modeling improves cloth simulation with neural networks
Explicit Frictional Contact Modeling in Neural Garment Simulation
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) simulate garments efficiently through physics-based self-supervision, but leave body-garment friction implicit or inside training energies, with no friction coefficient $μ$ to set at inference; retraining the tested GNNs with a coefficient-specific friction term barely responds to $μ$. Optimization-based solvers decide each contact's stick-slip state from the reaction that governs it, but only by re-optimizing the garment state at every step; a friction term in a one-pass training objective acts as a fixed-weight penalty on sliding, and the trained weights apply no per-contact Coulomb condition at inference. We therefore resolve friction explicitly after prediction: a Modular Contact Operator, attached to a frozen predictor without retraining or an iterative solve, estimates the normal load, applies a closed-form Coulomb correction along a path across body triangles, and propagates the induced motion through the cloth as a linearized membrane wave. On HOOD and ContourCraft, it raises sticking and lowers slip monotonically in $μ$, tracking a reference solver's response while coefficient-specific retraining stays flat, with low penetration and reference-consistent stretching at an eighth of the solver's runtime.
Longer coherent co-speech motion generated by separating past and present modeling
Past as State, Present as Attention: Persistent-State Blockwise Flow Matching for Long-Horizon Co-Speech Motion Generation
Abstract: Co-speech motion generation remains challenging over long horizons due to the need for temporal coherence and consistent style. Existing methods typically generate long motions segment by segment, either conditioning on a short seed of recent frames, which gradually drifts, or retaining ever-longer explicit histories, which are costly to maintain and hard to learn from limited data. We trace these limitations to a key asymmetry between past and present: past motion carries slowly varying style that should be compactly summarized, whereas the current segment exhibits fast-changing local dynamics that require fine-grained modeling. This asymmetry motivates a simple Past-As-State, Present-as-Attention principle for long-horizon co-speech motion generation. Following this principle, we propose PASPA, which summarizes past history with an inter-block persistent state and models the current segment with intra-block bidirectional self-attention. We instantiate PASPA within a blockwise flow matching framework, with multi-block supervision for effective training over variable histories, prefill-decode state caching for efficient rollout, and hybrid classifier-free guidance for enhanced history and speech conditioning. Extensive public-benchmark experiments show that PASPA achieves state-of-the-art FGD performance and preserves motion style across long-sequence generation.
Skeleton guidance improves robot world models for action prediction
Skeleton-Grounded Latent Action Model for Robot World Models
Abstract: Robot world models simulate how environments evolve in response to robot actions. Latent action models enable learning dynamics from videos by encoding visual transitions as proxy actions. However, reconstruction-driven latent actions mix robot motion with object responses and other scene changes, complicating their correspondence with robot controls. We propose SkeLAM, a skeleton-guided latent action model for controllable robot world modeling. SkeLAM decomposes latent actions into a kinematic component grounded by robot skeleton supervision and a residual component retaining complementary visual dynamics. Cross-modal swap reconstruction encourages RGB-derived and skeleton-derived kinematic representations to be interchangeable during video reconstruction. The world model incorporates both components through separate conditioning pathways, while branch dropout reduces its dependence on future-derived residual information. A lightweight adapter maps robot actions to the kinematic space, and subsequent world-model fine-tuning adapts generation to these predicted conditions. At inference, the model generates future observations from the current observation and robot actions. On DROID, SkeLAM reduces end-effector ADE by 19.5% and LPIPS by 11.1% compared with DreamDojo. Motion probing supports kinematic specialization, while qualitative results demonstrate zero-shot human-to-robot motion transfer in generated rollouts. Policy evaluation shows agreement between predicted success rates and those measured in real robot executions.
Audio video generation speeds up with selective caching approach
CAVC: Convergence-Adaptive Audio-Visual Cache for Modality-Asymmetric Diffusion Generation
Abstract: Diffusion-based audio-visual generation methods typically perform joint denoising of audio and video latents throughout the entire sampling trajectory, repeatedly executing modality-specific denoising branches and cross-modal attention at every timestep. However, we observe that such uniform joint computation is not always necessary. The key is a modality-asymmetric recoverability: audio-side drift introduced by mid-stage caching can be substantially reduced by only a few terminal joint denoising steps, whereas video-side degradation caused by caching leads to persistent loss of motion and temporal details. This asymmetry suggests that inference acceleration should selectively cache recoverable audio-side computation while preserving full video refinement. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{Convergence-Adaptive Audio-Visual Cache (CAVC)}, a training-free modality-asymmetric caching framework. CAVC adopts a sandwich-structured computation allocation: after detecting that audio denoiser outputs enter a cache-tolerant regime, it caches and reuses the audio denoiser output to bypass audio denoising and cross-modal attention in the middle stage, while the video branch continues independent spatio-temporal refinement; a few joint steps are then restored at the end to reduce accumulated cross-modal drift and improve synchronization. Experiments across multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that CAVC achieves 1.10--1.35x wall-clock acceleration, improves several visual dynamics and temporal statistics, and maintains competitive audio fidelity and audio-visual alignment.
Future chunk prediction improves video evolution modeling in autoregressive generation
Looking Ahead: Modeling Future Evolution in Autoregressive Video Generation
Abstract: Autoregressive video diffusion models generate videos chunk by chunk, yet producing plausible continuations does not guarantee that they capture how scenes evolve. Under teacher forcing, strong temporal redundancy may allow local visual continuity to serve as a shortcut for current-chunk denoising, reducing the pressure to model visual evolution. We introduce Future Chunk Prediction (FCP), an auxiliary objective jointly optimized with teacher-forced denoising that predicts temporally separated chunks without access to the intervening visual context. Drawing supervision directly from training videos, FCP requires no additional pretrained visual encoder and leaves autoregressive inference unchanged. Our method achieves superior physical plausibility over standard teacher-forced autoregressive training with a lower overall training compute budget, highlighting the effectiveness and efficiency of future-chunk supervision for modeling visual evolution. Intriguingly, our visualizations suggest that FCP fosters a more structured representation space, which may be valuable for building autoregressive world models.
Conversational system refines text guided motion with multi agent approach
Learn to Modify: Self-evolving Multi-agent Refinement Framework for Conversational Text-to-Motion Generation
Abstract: Despite rapid progress in text-to-motion generation, existing methods are commonly designed for single-shot generation. When users are dissatisfied with specific motion details, they are often forced to regenerate the entire sequence from scratch, which is computationally inefficient and potentially destroys previously established kinematic context. A practical generation system should instead support iterative user feedback and refine only the affected spatio-temporal regions while preserving the remaining motion. Therefore, we introduce a conversational motion generation paradigm that requires the system to coordinate instruction understanding, motion generation, localized editing, and quality assessment. Recent advances in LLM-driven multi-agent systems provide a promising foundation for such role-specialized coordination. To tackle these challenges, a Self-evolving Multi-Agent RefinemenT Framework (SMART) is proposed for conversational motion generation. Within SMART, to preserve semantic consistency, we design a semantic-guided masked motion editing mechanism, which precisely grounds natural language feedback into spatiotemporal motion regions to enable localized refinements without altering unedited regions. To reduce redundant exploration, we propose a memory-based self-evolving strategy that dynamically accumulates motion editing knowledge from interaction history and reuses past successful experience. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMART effectively supports multi-turn conversational motion generation and enables efficient motion refinement.
Manga2animate creates faithful animations from manga with script and storyboard checks
Manga2Animate: An Agentic Framework for Faithful Manga Animation with Script and Storyboard Planning
Abstract: Adapting existing manga into coherent animation that stays faithful to the source is a valuable yet challenging task. Existing methods either access the manga mainly through text, losing its characters and art style, or feed manga pages directly into video generation models, which misinterpret the manga's structure and produce incorrect storylines. In this paper, we propose Manga2Animate, a multi-agent framework that grounds every stage of generation in the source manga. We decompose the task into two intermediate representations, an animation script and a visual storyboard. Each representation is produced by a creator agent and reviewed against the source panels by a paired reviewer agent. We tailor representation-specific selection and dual-level feedback to progressively refine both before synthesizing the final animation. Extensive experiments and a user study demonstrate that Manga2Animate produces animations more faithful to the source manga and more consistent across shots than state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://annchenn.github.io/Manga2Animate/
ExMR improves hand and foot motion capture from a single video
ExMR: Extremity Motion Refinement for Monocular Human Motion Capture
Abstract: Detailed hand and foot articulation is important for animation and motion analysis, yet remains challenging to recover from monocular video. Recent expressive video methods infer hand articulation from shared whole-body representations. Our conference work suggests that this underexploits local evidence: the Foot Motion Refinement (FootMR) module refines ankle rotations from foot keypoints, improving reconstruction even when the initial estimator receives the same keypoints. We extend this principle to hands with the Hand Motion Refinement (HandMR) module. Because 2D finger keypoints are often missing or unreliable, HandMR combines image features of a pretrained hand reconstruction model with initial arm and hand rotations to refine elbows, wrists, and fingers. We integrate FootMR and HandMR into ExMR (Extremity Motion Refinement), a system for reconstructing 3D body, hand, and foot motion from monocular video. An initial temporal estimator predicts whole-body motion, after which both refiners revisit local evidence to predict residual joint rotations. Experiments on ARCTIC, MOYO, RICH, and MOOF show that ExMR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in hand and foot reconstruction, reducing hand per-vertex error and ankle joint angle error on MOYO by 19% and 18%, respectively, relative to the strongest competitor. Code will be made available for research purposes. Project page: https://twehrbein.github.io/exmr-website/
Dragonmocap captures dragon motion from single videos for diverse designs
DragonMoCap: Monocular Video-based Motion Capture for Diverse Dragon Topologies
Abstract: This work explores monocular motion capture for dragon-type characters, which currently relies on manual keyframing due to the lack of high-quality datasets and parametric models. The primary obstacle lies in the extreme topological diversity across dragon rigs, where varying joint counts and naming conventions render traditional fixed-template regressors inapplicable. To address this, we introduce DragonMoCap, a novel framework that treats the target rig as a dynamic input rather than a fixed prior. By deliberately scoping the framework to the most prevalent production topologies, we ensure high-fidelity results across diverse morphologies. The core of our approach is the design of language-grounded joint query tokens, which establish a dual-property representation: ensuring intra-rig discriminability while maintaining cross-rig similarity. We further propose a non-parametric query-token retrieval mechanism to enable zero-shot adaptation to unseen rigs without retraining. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that DragonMoCap consistently outperforms HMR-style baselines across diverse dragon topologies. The practical utility of our framework is further evidenced by its integration into professional animation workflows, highlighting its potential for real-time industrial applications.
Painting change map enables precise control of digital painting videos
Painting Change Map as guidance for generating painting processes
Abstract: Digital art generation has undergone a massive paradigm shift, moving from static image synthesis to dynamic video generation that can mimic the human painting process. While existing models can synthesize visually stunning time-lapses of paintings being created or "unpainted," they largely treat the creative process as a black box. Current conditioning mechanisms are either too rigid, relying on static geometric cues like Canny edges or depth maps, or too holistic, utilizing simple scalar progress variables that offer no localized control. Consequently, users lack the agency to steer how a painting evolves over time. In this work, we argue that true control over the video generation of artwork requires a joint understanding of two fundamental dimensions: where an artist acts, and when those actions take place. To achieve this, we introduce the Painting Change Map, a novel spatio-temporal control mechanism that explicitly tracks normalized structural changes across a 1,000-timestep continuum, a resolution sufficient to capture fine-grained stroke-level changes while remaining computationally tractable. By mapping localized visual differences into an encoded RGB space, our representation enables fine-grained guidance for both the forward painting and reverse unpainting processes. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates the efficacy of our approach. We outperform existing control baselines and achieve competitive or superior results compared to state-of-the-art painting methods. Furthermore, under oracle conditions, our method surpasses all baselines by a significant margin. Code is available at https://github.com/Markus-Pobitzer/painting-change-map.
Speech encoder improves lip movement accuracy in 3d facial animation
CASE: Complementary Articulation-Aware Speech Encoder to Enhance Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation
Abstract: General-purpose self-supervised speech encoders provide strong acoustic representations, but their pretraining objectives are not explicitly aligned with the visible articulatory dynamics required by speech-driven 3D facial animation. We propose CASE (Complementary Articulation-aware Speech Encoder), a complementary speech encoder adapted by contrastively aligning short speech clips with continuous 3D lip-mesh VQ-VAE latents. After adaptation, the geometry branch is removed, and the audio-only CASE representation is fused with the baseline SSL speech representation through residual cross-attention, while retaining the motion-decoder architecture and objective. Across four VOCASET baselines, CASE reduces mean lip vertex error by 2.8-6.0%, and mean full-face vertex error decreases in every system. Under the same fusion protocol, CASE yields lower mean LVE than the unadapted AV-SE stream on all four generators, with model-dependent margins. Because adaptation uses Korean speech-geometry pairs and evaluation uses English VOCASET, the result is consistent with cross-language downstream transfer under a shared English-pretrained audio-visual prior.
SpriteStage enables long animations by building scenes step-by-step
SpriteStage: Long Horizon Animation Generation via Progressive Scene Programming and Replay
Abstract: Video generation models synthesize visual sequences from text and image inputs. Extending video generation to long animations requires actions, dialogue, camera coverage, and narrative developments to remain coordinated across scenes. Executable scene programs make these decisions available for inspection. Constructing an entire story before observing its execution can leave later scenes dependent on unrealized events. We present SpriteStage, a progressive scene programming framework that builds animation through iterative enactment and engine reorchestration. Iterative enactment generates each scene from an accepted world checkpoint and narrative snapshot, executes it on a shared spatial stage, and uses runtime and visual feedback to revise the relevant actions or story beats. The accepted outcome becomes the starting state for the next scene. Engine reorchestration maps the resulting draft to production assets and engine capabilities while retaining its events, geometry, and timing. Inspection of the assembled sequence and frozen replay carry the accepted performance into the final video. Three complete animations, ranging from approximately 9.9 to 14.3 minutes, demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in producing extended narratives through scene programming and engine execution.
Human motion generation improves with moving spatial sounds
MOMO: Human Motion from Moving Sounds
Abstract: Human responses to sound depend not only on its semantic content, but also on the evolving spatial relationship between source and listener, conveyed through spatial audio and its temporal dynamics. Modeling human reactions to such dynamic spatial audio is important for character animation, human behavior analysis, and robotics. As of yet, existing audio-driven motion generation methods primarily focus on non-spatial or static acoustic conditions, leaving this important problem largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we formulate the novel task of dynamic spatial-audio-driven human motion generation and introduce two motion-captured datasets. We introduce the Dynamic Spatial Audio and Motion dataset (DySAM) as the first dataset and benchmark for this task, providing synchronized binaural audio, 3D human motions, and moving sound source trajectories. Given the importance of dynamic spatial cues of sound sources, we further provide the Dynamic Spatial Audio Localization dataset (DySAL), an auxiliary binaural localization dataset that pairs diverse acoustic events with head poses and moving source trajectories to support spatial audio perception. For benchmarking, we propose MOMO for human Motion generation from Moving Sounds, a diffusion-based framework guided by three coupled principles: localization, understanding, and generation. MOMO performs localization by estimating head-centric spatial direction cues of the moving source directly from raw binaural audio, avoiding reliance on ground-truth source coordinates. It performs understanding by extracting frame-wise audio-content representations, and performs generation by conditioning motion diffusion on both semantic features and dynamic spatial cues. Experiments show that MOMO outperforms existing baselines in motion fidelity, audio-motion alignment, and physical plausibility.
Dreamhmr improves human body and hand motion capture from videos
DreamHMR: From Video Generation to Human Motion Modeling via Structural Focusing
Abstract: Human mesh recovery (HMR) provides a geometric foundation for understanding human motion, but accurately reconstructing both body motion and fine hand articulation from videos remains challenging, especially in real-world scenes where occlusion and partial visibility are common. Video generation pretraining offers rich spatial and temporal priors for this task, but its focus on visual synthesis leaves a gap between these representations and explicit human geometry. We present DreamHMR, a general framework that adapts video generation priors for complete body-and-hand reconstruction. It follows a global-to-local strategy, first grounding video representations in human geometry and then refining body and hand detail with reliable local evidence. Global Body Representation Transfer trains the video backbone to predict complete human renderings, turning its native prediction task into a means of learning surface correspondence and posed geometry. Local Joint Feature Enhancement combines contextual estimates with reliable local evidence to recover fine body and hand detail, while limiting interference from occluders and background. Experiments on five datasets with four video backbones demonstrate strong reconstruction performance across backbone families. Under a unified evaluation protocol, our best model outperforms the best existing methods on all reported metrics of 3DPW, EMDB-1, and RICH, reducing body MPJPE by 4.2%, 4.7%, and 6.1%, respectively. In more challenging occlusion settings on held-out BEDLAM and EgoBody sequences, DreamHMR reduces overall body and hand MPJPE by 7.0% and 10.0%, respectively. Our code will be made publicly available.
Cepheid enables dense 3D motion from sparse points across object types
Cepheid: Decoupling Scale from Structure for Cross-Family Motion Completion
Abstract: Sparse-to-dense motion completion recovers dense mesh motion from sparse vertex displacements. Residual priors trained on one geometry family frequently fail to beat parameter-free harmonic extension off-family. Moreover, cross-family training meets a scaling barrier: residual amplitude varies by more than an order of magnitude across geometry families and collapses as observations become denser. Since this scale depends on unknown target motion, it cannot be measured directly at test time. We decouple residual structure from physical scale by learning a dimensionless prior, estimating amplitude from observables and a lightweight correction fitted only on training sources. Our unified model surpasses harmonic extension across all evaluated families, including unseen cloth and legged bodies, without skeletons, registration, or cross-mesh correspondence. The same prior applies without retraining to point-tracked animal video and a robot grasping a soft body. Project page: https://su-terry.github.io/cepheid-website/
Geometry attention distillation improves video generation consistency
GAD: Geometry Attention Distillation for Consistent Video Generation
Abstract: Video diffusion models generate visually compelling short-term sequences but often struggle to preserve scene geometry and object structure over time. In this paper, we first demonstrate that current video attention cannot identify reliable correspondences across frames, with responses dispersed across multiple regions even after recognizable scene structure has emerged. We argue that reliable cross-frame associations are essential for information exchange as scene structure forms in video generation. Thus, we introduce Geometry Attention Distillation (GAD), which transfers correspondences from a frozen geometry model's attention to video attention. Extracted from clean videos, these correspondences link the same static surface or moving object across frames. Since structure formation begins in deeper layers at higher noise and shallower layers at lower noise, we apply attention distillation at a student layer selected according to the noise timestep. After training, video attention focuses more consistently on corresponding locations. Experiments across all three video backbones demonstrate improved long-range scene consistency and dynamic temporal consistency, with geometric gains across generation lengths. On Wan2.2 5B, GAD improves cross-frame matching accuracy by at least 30% over the Wan baseline on both long-range benchmarks. Notably, GAD achieves these gains without additional inference modules, offering a promising approach to efficient and consistent video-based world simulation. Project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/GAD/.
Video generation improves memory retrieval across long scenes
CineMem: Attention-Aligned Fine-grained Memory Retrieval for Multi-Shot Long Video Generation
Abstract: Autoregressive video generation relies on memory retrieval to model long-range dependencies. This capability becomes particularly critical for multi-shot generation, where models must reconcile substantial visual changes across shot transitions with persistent semantic continuity. Existing methods tend to perform memory retrieval at the frame level and share the same historical context across all query tokens, overlooking the heterogeneous information needs and leading to redundant retrieval and inefficient use of historical memory. To bridge this gap, we introduce CineMem, an attention-aligned fine-grained memory retrieval framework that combines online memory organization with query-adaptive retrieval for autoregressive multi-shot video generation. Specifically, guided by intrinsic memory-access patterns revealed through attention analysis, we propose an online-clustered KV cache as a memory organization strategy over all historical tokens, enabling semantic-aware memory grouping and more precise retrieval. In addition, we introduce a query-level retrieval mechanism that provides broader access to historical information under a fixed retrieval budget, thereby improving long-term memory utilization. Together, these designs enable the multi-shot video generator to preserve long-range consistency across shot transitions, particularly in revisitation scenarios, while approximating full-memory access under a constrained memory budget. To facilitate evaluation, we further introduce a suite of task-specific, VLM-assisted metrics for faithful inter-shot consistency assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
Cross-species portrait animation aligns expressions across animals and humans
CrossPortrait: Cross-Species Portrait Animation via Adversarial Motion Alignment
Abstract: Cross-species portrait animation, which aims to animate a source portrait of species A using a driving video of species B, is particularly challenging due to substantial anatomical differences in facial structures across species. Previous works typically fine-tune human portrait animation models on animal video datasets but often suffer from driving-species leakage. To address this, we propose CrossPortrait, a novel framework for expressive cross-species portrait animation, supporting diverse scenarios including human-to-animal, animal-to-human and cross-species animal-to-animal (e.g. cat-to-dog) animation. Specifically, we decompose the portrait motion into rigid head poses and expression keypoints. To accommodate species-specific facial structures while facilitating cross-species expression alignment, we introduce a species-routed expression encoder that incorporates species-specific LoRAs into a unified expression encoder. Furthermore, we introduce expression-level adversarial domain adaptation (Ex-ADA) to suppress driving-species-specific information in the expression latents, thereby mitigating species leakage and promoting a shared expression space across species. Extensive experiments show that our method enables expressive and identity-preserving portrait animation across diverse species and outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.
Visual memory improves long video consistency across multiple shots
REEL: Learning to Retrieve, Evaluate, and Evolve Visual Memory for Any Long-Horizon Multi-Shot Video Generation
Abstract: Memory-based long-video generation aims to combine user control with long-range visual consistency. We organize this process into three functional components: a planner, an adapter, and a generator. Representative multi-shot systems couple memory to generator-specific interfaces or use predefined agent workflows, rather than independently training a memory policy for cross-shot objectives. We introduce REEL, a general-purpose visual-memory planner. Through a unified tool interface, REEL learns to retrieve references, create missing visual evidence, and update persistent memory. Backend-specific adapters translate its evidence plans into supported conditioning inputs, allowing the same policy to guide different black-box video generators. To train REEL, we construct two high-quality datasets, REEL-SFT-4k and REEL-RL-1k, covering diverse interaction patterns and prompt types. Training proceeds in three stages: supervised fine-tuning, single-shot Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), and multi-shot GRPO. Multi-shot GRPO carries policy-generated memory across consecutive shots, so later outcomes guide earlier reference selection and memory updates. REEL-Bench tests identity preservation and intended state changes under text-only requests and timed reference-image uploads. On JoyAI-Echo~1.5 and MiniMax-H3, REEL improves cross-shot consistency on ST-Bench by 15.1\% and 20.7\%, and Core-100 on our proposed REEL-Bench by 2.41 and 8.32 points, respectively, over the no-memory baseline.
ELECT keeps story characters consistent without slowing down rendering
ELECT: Settling Identity Before Rendering for Scalable Story Visualization
Abstract: Training-free story visualization without reference images must preserve recurring entities across frames while scaling to long narratives. Existing methods typically maintain consistency by conditioning each frame on other frames of the same story, coupling generation time, VRAM, or both to story length. We introduce ELECT, which instead settles cross-frame identity before final rendering through a language-guided scene-entity mapping and stationary anchors elected from the model's own drafts. This makes the per-frame cost of the final rendering pass independent of story length. Joint attention exceeds 96 GB of VRAM at 32 scenes, whereas ELECT remains at 8.3 s per frame and under 20 GB VRAM from 10 to 1000 scenes. On the Story50 long-story benchmark, ELECT reaches 0.833 average Character Consistency Similarity (aCCS), compared with 0.826 for ten-round refinement, at one seventh of its generation cost, with lower text alignment (0.327 vs. 0.340). At 1000 scenes, to our knowledge, the first evaluation of training-free story visualization at this length, ELECT exceeds ten-round refinement by 0.017 aCCS and the nearest flat-cost baseline by 0.091, while also surpassing refinement in text alignment at one twenty-fourth of its generation time. These results show that long-horizon consistency need not require increasingly expensive inter-frame conditioning as stories grow.
Image models generate 3D human motion across different skeletons
Image Diffusion Models Are Good 3D Human Motion Generators
Abstract: Text-to-motion generation typically relies on dataset-specific skeletal representations, with models trained separately for benchmarks with different joint layouts. We investigate whether image diffusion architectures can model 3D human motion through a common image-compatible representation that accommodates heterogeneous skeletal layouts while preserving motion-specific kinematic structure. To this end, we organize root-centered joint trajectories into topology-informed joint--time images and model global root dynamics through a complementary latent stream. A motion autoencoder conditions local-motion decoding on the root latent, while a text-conditioned Scalable Interpolant Transformer (SiT) jointly generates both latent streams, with supervision on decoded 3D joint positions further constraining generation in motion space. In addition to dataset-specific models, we train a single motion autoencoder on HumanML3D and KIT-ML, followed by a single text-conditioned SiT shared across both datasets, preserving their respective skeletal definitions without skeleton retargeting to a common joint layout. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that our dataset-specific models achieve state-of-the-art performance, while shared training yields further gains on both benchmarks, demonstrating the benefits of shared modeling across heterogeneous skeletal layouts.
Long-term text driven human motion modeling improves with new dataset
ELMA: Benchmarking Anaphoric Compositions for Long-Term Text-to-Motion Generation
Abstract: Text-guided long-term human motion generation is essential for applications such as continuously operating digital avatars. Despite recent progress on short clips, existing models struggle with multi-segment instructions that involve anaphora, where constraints established in earlier segments must be preserved over time. In this paper, we introduce a novel task of long-term motion generation from such anaphoric compositions. To mitigate this, we present ELMA, an episodic long-term motion dataset with dense segment-level annotations that preserve cross-segment dependencies. Built via a fully automated collection and filtering pipeline, ELMA extracts high-quality, continuous 30-second clips from in-the-wild videos, capturing the episodic narratives necessary for long-range state modeling. Leveraging this dataset, we fine-tune state-of-the-art motion generation models to incorporate long-range context. Extensive experiments reveal fundamental shortcomings in current models when handling context-dependent instructions. We demonstrate that ELMA enables significant improvements in both global physical realism and semantic alignment, setting a robust new baseline for long-term motion synthesis.
Video frame prediction improved by aligning motion and semantics
Destination-Conditioned Adaptation with Semantic-Geometric Alignment for Generative Inbetweening
Abstract: Generative inbetweening aims to synthesize temporally coherent intermediate frames between a start frame and a target frame. Although pretrained image-to-video diffusion models provide strong priors for large-motion inbetweening, they are not explicitly designed to reach a specified target frame. They may therefore generate realistic individual frames while drifting from the target or producing unstable motion under large displacements and non-rigid dynamics. We propose DSG-GI, a framework that adapts pretrained latent video diffusion models through \textbf{D}estination-Conditioned Adaptation and \textbf{S}emantic-\textbf{G}eometric Alignment. Destination-Conditioned Adaptation treats the target frame as the destination of the sequence and provides temporally progressive guidance along the generated trajectory. Semantic-Geometric Alignment aligns the token-wise spatio-temporal relational geometry of backbone features with that of a frozen video foundation encoder and applies a flow-matching-aware latent flow constraint to samples near the data endpoint of the probability path. Together, these components strengthen destination guidance and preserve coherent semantic-geometric motion structure. Extensive experiments on standard and large-motion inbetweening benchmarks demonstrate improvements in temporal stability, target-frame faithfulness, and perceptual quality. Our code will be made publicly available.
Motioncoach improves fine professional motion editing in videos
MotionCoach: Constructing Multimodal Guidance for Video Professional Motion Editing
Abstract: Video editing models achieve strong performance in modifying appearance, backgrounds, styles, and motions, empowered by large-scale training data. Beyond general scenarios, professional motions are significant in performance, sports, and martial arts. This paper focuses on professional motion editing, which involves fine-grained motion technique and temporal structure. Given professional motion names but lacking detailed descriptions, existing models often fail to generate professional motions, such as incorrectly lifting the front wheel under a Stoppie instruction. To address this challenge, we introduce MotionCoach, a trained multimodal agent that uses multi-turn tools and performs self-verification, producing a grounded prompt and a reference clip as reliable and sufficient multimodal guidance to inject external professional motion knowledge into video editing models. To supply training data, we build a data pipeline to construct trajectories. We cold-start the agent on MotionCoach-SFT-10k and apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on MotionCoach-RL-2k with rewards on the motion guidance prompt, the motion outcome video, and the format. For evaluation, we introduce VPMEBench, comprising 314 professional motion editing tasks with fine-grained references and annotations. Extensive experiments show that MotionCoach improves the overall score from 55.1 to 65.6 on Seedance 2.0 and from 51.2 to 64.5 on MiniMax-H3. Learning to construct multimodal guidance enables precise professional motion editing without retraining video editing models.
Prioritized motion retargeting improves humanoid robot movements
PriMoRetarget: Humanoid Motion Transfer Through Prioritized Motion Retargeting
Abstract: Motion retargeting is a critical preprocessing step for transferring human motion data to humanoid robots. While existing methods are effective for single-character motions, interactions involving multiple characters and objects introduce additional contacts and spatial relationships that must be preserved. Retargeting is commonly formulated as a weighted multi-objective optimization problem, where conflicting objectives can require careful tuning of relative weights and can still compromise important motion characteristics. We introduce PriMoRetarget, a prioritized motion-retargeting framework that replaces relative objective weighting with an explicit priority hierarchy. Lower-priority updates are constrained to preserve higher-priority objectives, allowing critical characteristics such as foot placement and interaction contacts to take precedence over lower-priority pose objectives. The method is evaluated on four datasets spanning single-character motion, character-object manipulation, and character-character interactions. The resulting motions better preserve task-relevant interactions and provide reference trajectories that can be tracked more reliably than those produced by widely used retargeting methods.
VioLA enables humanoid robots to follow human motion naturally
VioLA: Learning Generalist Humanoid Control Policies from Human Data
Abstract: Teaching a humanoid to follow instructions with its whole body runs into two obstacles. Its action space is large and tightly coupled: legs, arms, and fingers must move together while the robot keeps its balance, which makes joint-level actions hard to learn. And humanoid demonstrations are scarce, so current humanoid generalist policies do not follow new instructions out of the box and are fine-tuned on teleoperated demonstrations of each task before deployment. Human demonstrations exist in far larger numbers, but a person's motion is not a robot command. We remove both obstacles by changing what the generalist policy predicts. We introduce VioLA, a generalist humanoid policy that predicts body and hand motion latents instead of joint commands. A pretrained body- and hand-controller execute these latents on the robot. Their corresponding motion encoders map human and robot motion into the same latent spaces. A human recording is therefore labeled in the policy's action space, and the training demonstration pool contains 140.6 million frames, 93.2% of them human. As a result, VioLA follows locomotion instructions on the real robot zero-shot, without task-specific fine-tuning, reaching 100% success where GR00T N1.7 and $Ψ_0$ reach 16.7% and 0%, respectively. It also reaches 88.6% manipulation success without task-specific fine-tuning. The same approach works across two VLA and one world-action model backbones. A generalist policy trained on human demonstrations alone performs locomotion tasks on the real robot zero-shot. Code and checkpoints will be released.
Group dance generation method scales to variable group sizes efficiently
Breaking the Group Size Barrier: Parameter-Efficient Group Dance Generation with Chain-of-Dancers
Abstract: Group dance generation aims to synthesize coordinated multi-dancer choreography from music, with broad applications in animation and interactive content creation. This task requires modeling dense inter-person dependencies to ensure spatial coordination, while naturally preserving individual dancer identities. Existing approaches model all dancers jointly with end-to-end transformers, which tie the architecture to a fixed group size and entangle per-dancer identities across frames. We propose ChainDance, a scalable framework that reformulates group dance generation as a Chain-of-Dancers: a sequential decomposition over per-dancer conditional distributions, allowing a single model to scale across variable group sizes without retraining and naturally preserving per-dancer identity. Built on a frozen single-dancer diffusion backbone, ChainDance introduces two lightweight modules: a Role-Aware Text Encoder (RATE) for per-dancer semantic conditioning, and a Group-Aware Motion Encoder (GAME) that aggregates previously generated dancers via a distance-weighted graph convolutional network, and incorporates a training-free noise optimization procedure at inference time to enforce global spatial coherence. Experiments on AIOZ-GDance demonstrate that ChainDance achieves state-of-the-art motion quality and group coordination while structurally preserving per-dancer identity, with $3$-$4\times$ fewer parameters and requiring $3$-$6\times$ less training time compared to prior approaches.
Wavelet diffusion improves realistic long speech driven 3d motion
DynaConTalk: Wavelet-Constrained Diffusion for Long-Form and Controllable Holistic Co-Speech 3D Motion
Abstract: Holistic co-speech animation is prone to averaging in both motion representation and speech conditioning. In coordinate-space diffusion, slow body posture, mid-frequency gesture strokes, and fast hand or facial details are entangled in one prediction target, often producing low-variance, over-smoothed motion. Meanwhile, dense rhythmic and acoustic cues can dominate sparse content-specific information under fixed multimodal fusion. We present DynaConTalk, a wavelet-constrained diffusion framework for long-form and controllable holistic co-speech motion generation. Diffusion operates in stationary wavelet transform (SWT) coefficient space, whose temporally aligned bands separate coarse posture evolution, gesture strokes, and fine expressive details. Our dynamic gating network preserves HuBERT and speaker identity as a base and selectively adds rhythm, mel, and transcript features through motion-state- and noise-aware residual gates. Attention pooling and learned depth routing deliver complementary conditions to each denoising stage, while a frame-resolution rhythm path preserves precise timing. A signed proposal-consensus update then reconciles these conditions with the evolving motion state. Matched-noise constraint injection uses the same sampling interface for history continuation and localized keypose repair, and extends to reference-guided control. Separate body-hand and facial denoisers, followed by inverse SWT and a pose-driven root regressor, produce holistic motion. Experiments evaluate generation quality, facial accuracy, temporal continuity, and controllable editing. Code, models, and the interactive editing interface are available at https://github.com/zhuyifeiabcd1/DynaConTalk.
Point-based method improves facial animation transfer without artifacts
PDB: Point-Based Deformation Blending for Facial Animation Retargeting
Abstract: Mesh-agnostic facial animation retargeting transfers expressions across meshes with different structures, but preserving facial motion without surface artifacts remains challenging. To address this, we present PDB, Point-Based Deformation Blending for facial animation retargeting. PDB predicts a compact set of deformed control points from a source neutral-expression pair and blending weights from the target neutral mesh. The weights are computed once per target and reused across frames, while the control points vary with each source expression. ReLU enforces non-negative weights and permits exact zeros, followed by row-wise normalization. The target mesh is reconstructed directly by multiplying the weights and control points, without a predefined cage, precomputed coordinates, a learned per-element deformation decoder, or a global reconstruction solve. Trained only with self-retargeting reconstruction supervision, PDB supports cross-identity transfer without paired cross-identity training expressions. Experiments demonstrate accurate retargeting, fast inference, and localized support in the learned weights. Joint evaluation of expression accuracy and local surface preservation shows reduced surface artifacts relative to the evaluated dense displacement method while retaining the intended motion. Perceptual evaluations further support expression fidelity and visual quality in both self- and cross-retargeting.
Topology aware transformer edits motion for various humanoid skeletons
TAME:Topology-Aware Text-Driven Motion Editing across Heterogeneous Humanoid Skeletons
Abstract: Text-driven motion editing modifies an existing motion sequence according to a text instruction while preserving the content of the source motion. Existing methods are typically built for a single, fixed skeletal topology, which limits their use in animation pipelines where characters differ in joint count and skeletal hierarchy. We present Topology-Aware Motion Editor (TAME), a flow-matching transformer that edits motions on humanoid skeletons of varying topology. TAME represents motion as per-joint, per-frame tokens and models interactions among joints, across frames, and with the text instruction through skeletal, temporal, and text cross-attention layers. To make the skeletal attention follow each character's hierarchy, TAME replaces full joint attention with Topology-Constrained Skeletal Propagation (TCSP), which restricts attention to one-hop kinematic neighbors in the skeleton's adjacency matrix. We further introduce Edit-Focused Representation Alignment (EFRA), a self-distilled representation alignment strategy that aligns student features with cleaner EMA-teacher features exclusively on edit-relevant joint-time tokens, making edits faithful to the instruction. To make this setting trainable and comparable, we construct TopoMotionFix, a multi-topology extension of MotionFix with seen- and unseen-topology evaluation protocols. TAME outperforms previous methods in edit alignment and source preservation on MotionFix and reliably edits motions on unseen skeletons in TopoMotionFix.
Speech driven 3d facial animation lacks natural lip movement shape
The Shape of Speech: A Geometric Measure of Coarticulation for Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation
Abstract: Speech-driven 3D facial animation can reproduce recognizable mouth poses. However, it can simplify the motion between them, and that motion carries coarticulation, the way the sounds around each sound shape its articulation. We introduce a geometric measure of this trajectory shaping: lip-path length compared with the shortest route through the vowel, consonant and vowel positions of a speech segment. In contrast to the endpoint chord, this consonant-aware route accounts for obligatory transit and avoids degeneracy, while preserving invariance to uniform motion gain. The measure needs only a forced alignment, so it applies where no ground truth exists. We demonstrate it on four state-of-the-art methods, one per architectural family, real-time and offline. All four trace flatter lip trajectories than captured speech. Against frame-rate-matched ground truth, DiffPoseTalk, ARTalk and FaceFormer show clear deficits, equivalent on this measure to removing 15-60% of real speech's fast articulatory component. CodeTalker is marginal on the primary measure and clear on a companion measure. A pre-registered study with 97 viewers and 3,523 judgments underpins the measured direction: controlled damping of real motion lowers the score and is penalized, whereas exaggeration shows no detected penalty over the tested range. Viewers also prefer real speech in 73.4% of sentence comparisons and, in the aggregate, on single words. Together, the measure, its calibration and the study identify a perceptually relevant loss of trajectory shaping and a concrete target for improving synthesized articulation.
Video diffusion model reveals hidden 3D human motion signals
Parasitic Co-Denoising: Unlocking 3D Human Motion Generation in a Frozen Video Diffusion Model
Abstract: Despite never being supervised on explicit 3D motion, large-scale text-to-video diffusion models synthesize realistic human motion in their generated videos. We ask whether this implicit knowledge can be turned into explicit 3D motion generation, without training a separate motion model. Probing a frozen Wan2.1 reveals that a recoverable motion signal is present in its intermediate states across the entire denoising schedule, not confined to the clean output. Motivated by this, we introduce parasitic co-denoising, a paradigm in which motion is decoded from the host model along its denoising schedule rather than produced by an independent generator. We instantiate it as the Parasitic Motion Decoder (PMD), an efficient flow-matching decoder that shares the host's noise schedule and reads its intermediate features through a $σ$-adaptive multi-layer fusion, leaving the host unmodified. Drawing its coverage from the host rather than from motion data, PMD leads dedicated motion generators on text-motion alignment at a small fraction of their trainable parameters, while producing paired video and motion in a single pass that motion-only baselines cannot match.
Human motion generation improves with frequency separated tokens
Rethinking Fixed Temporal Grids: Frequency-Disentangled Motion Generation
Abstract: Most human motion generation methods encode motion as tokens on a uniform temporal grid, where every token spans the same fixed time window. Human motion, however, is temporally heterogeneous: slowly evolving global trajectories coexist with rapid transient events such as foot contacts and joint impulses. Forcing such multi-scale dynamics onto tokens of identical temporal resolution entangles motion frequencies, leaving slow regions redundant while smoothing out the rapid details that distinguish realistic motion. We propose \textbf{FreqMo}, a scale-adaptive motion representation that decomposes motion into wavelet frequency bands, separating dynamics across temporal scales while preserving temporal localization and exact reconstruction. Unified Frequency Residual Quantization (UFRQ) then encodes all bands within a single shared codebook, compressing the token sequence threefold and enabling stable single-stage generation. Experiments show FreqMo attains SOTA fidelity with substantially improved high-frequency preservation, and the same decomposition transfers to continuous diffusion backbones.
Text to motion models made faster and lighter with efficient distillation
TACD: Distilling Efficient Text-to-Motion Models via Terminal Amplification Control
Abstract: Recent text-to-motion models have improved motion quality and instruction following, yet many-step denoising and large model components make deployment slow and memory-intensive. We present Terminal-Amplification-Controlled Distillation (TACD), an on-policy approach for training efficient motion generators from text prompts and pretrained teachers, without real-motion training data. Building on segmented on-policy flow distillation, we supervise clean-motion predictions along student-generated trajectories. We identify a failure mode in which velocity matching on a fixed supervision grid repeatedly overweights errors near the denoising endpoint, degrading few-step generation. TACD ties the latest teacher query to the student's step size, bounding the effective loss weights in clean-motion space without changing inference. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML demonstrate improved few-step generation, including a 58% reduction in eight-step HY-Motion student FID relative to distillation without this bound. For diffusion teachers, the endpoint-matching form of TACD yields four-step students with lower FID and matched or improved text-motion retrieval relative to their 50-step teachers on HumanML3D. On HY-Motion and Kimodo, eight-step students with compact components achieve 7.7-11.9x end-to-end speedups and reduce peak GPU memory by 3.8-6.7x relative to their teachers. Project page: https://vkgo.github.io/TACD/
FlashDexRetarget speeds up robot hand motion transfer with less training
FlashDexRetarget: Accelerating Dexterous Manipulation Data Generation through Multi-Motion Retargeting
Abstract: Human hand-object demonstrations offer a reusable source of dexterous robot manipulation data, but transferring them across embodiments requires physically feasible retargeting. Existing physics-based approaches face limitations in retargeting success, motion-specific training efficiency, or both. To address these limitations, we introduce FlashDexRetarget, an RL-based framework for high-success, efficient dexterous motion retargeting. To make the demonstrated interaction easier to learn, we combine object point-cloud observations, hand-object distance features, and future trajectory encodings with complementary rewards that supervise object motion and reference hand-object relationships. To further accelerate learning, we employ separate left- and right-hand actor critic networks and adapt the off-policy algorithm, FlashSAC to dexterous motion tracking. On a benchmark of 50 motions spanning single-object and two-object interactions, FlashDexRetarget achieves a 90% success rate, approximately 2.5x that of the evaluated sampling-based baselines, while requiring up to 100x less training compute than the evaluated RL-based baselines. Evaluations on both XHand and Sharpa Wave Hand show consistent gains, and component-wise ablations examine the contributions of our design choices. Beyond the 50-motion benchmark, experiments with 200, 500, and 1,000 motions demonstrate that our method remains stable at larger scales and produces successful retargeted motions more efficiently as the training set grows. Qualitative replay results using real-world-captured demonstrations further illustrate the applicability of our framework to recorded human manipulation. Videos and code are available at https://davian-robotics.github.io/FlashDexRetarget/
Video generation improves subject consistency over long dynamic scenes
Towards Subject Consistency over Dynamic Subject Sets in Video Generation
Abstract: We argue that as video generation extends to longer durations, subject consistency should be evaluated over \textit{dynamic subject sets}. We therefore introduce \textbf{DynSC-Eval}, an evaluation framework that dynamically tracks eligible subjects throughout their visible lifespans and measures local continuity and global identity preservation using six complementary object-level metrics, with explicit detection of inconsistency events. To validate its effectiveness, we design synthetic experiments that actively inject inconsistency events, demonstrating both the sensitivity of DynSC-Eval and the limitations of existing metrics. Evaluations of diverse models on 5s, 15s, and 60s video generation further reveal substantial subject consistency differences that are obscured by conventional metrics. Beyond evaluation, we construct rewards from DynSC-Eval and apply DiffusionNFT post-training in an autonomous-driving testbed. On 5s generation, our approach reduces the six inconsistency metrics by an average of 13.82\% for Wan-2.1-1.3B and 5.66\% for SANA-2B, with improvements also observed on the I2V model ReSim. Qualitative comparisons further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We then extend generation to 10s and 30s through curriculum learning and show that consistency optimization remains effective while largely preserving other capabilities.
Triangular resampling improves long-term motion generation accuracy
Triangular Resampling for Long-Horizon Motion Generation
Abstract: We introduce Triangular Resampling (TR), a post-training method for mitigating long-horizon error accumulation in motion diffusion models. Built on FloodDiffusion's triangular denoising schedule, TR addresses the mismatch between ground-truth-derived training windows and model-generated inference states. Replacing only completed motion history leaves this mismatch unresolved in partially denoised states within the active window. TR therefore extends rollout-based training to these states, using ground-truth clamping to limit excessive drift. For each replayed sample, TR draws one denoising threshold, shared across latent positions and replay updates, and replays multi-step triangular denoising without gradient tracking. After each update, states below the threshold are replaced with noise-matched ground truth, while those at or above it retain model predictions. The resulting latent window enters the standard training update. This rollout construction supports both supervised training (TR) and distribution matching (TR-DMD). On 120-second motion generation from HumanML3D test prompts, TR and TR-DMD achieve state-of-the-art FID AUC within their respective non-DMD and DMD comparison groups. Supervised TR reduces FID AUC by 40.9% and FID degradation slope by 55.3% relative to matched post-training without replay.
Robot motions for interacting with objects learned from human contact data
HOI-Retarget: Contact-Centric Retargeting for Human-Object Interaction
Abstract: Learning from demonstration (LfD) has enabled humanoid robots to acquire diverse whole-body skills, but extending this paradigm to human-object interaction (HOI) is limited by the availability of robot-compatible interaction references. We present HOI-Retarget, a contact-centric retargeting method that transfers HOI onto a humanoid robot for large-scale motion-data generation. Its windowed trajectory optimization uses every labeled contact as a target in the object frame, balancing body tracking, foot support and smoothness under the robot's kinematic limits. The method can augment a single demonstration across object sizes, absorb contacts reconstructed from monocular video, and extend to several robots manipulating one object. We publicly release the code and the retargeted motion dataset.
EditWorld enables precise video editing in interactive virtual worlds
Precise Editing and Flexible Referencing for Interactable Worlds
Abstract: We present EditWorld, a video world model for precise editing and flexible referencing in interactable worlds. Existing video world models primarily focus on navigation, letting users explore generated worlds but offering limited control over how existing world content is modified. EditWorld extends world modeling from exploration to precise modification by streaming editing instructions and reference images during autoregressive generation. To support these capabilities, EditWorld introduces Gated Causal Attention for temporally varying editing conditions and reference images, together with a Sparse Context mechanism that maintains a bounded historical context for long-horizon inference. We further adopt joint autoregressive and bidirectional training with annealed self-resampling, and construct a dedicated data synthesis and annotation pipeline that provides supervision for world editing. We also present WBench-Editing to systematically evaluate streaming world editing capabilities. EditWorld achieves the best overall performance on WBench-Editing with an overall score of 73.8 and an editing score of 80.0, substantially outperforming existing methods on editing-related metrics. https://github.com/leoisufa/EditWorld
Large dataset enables better editing of versatile 3D digital models
Scaling Versatile 3D Assets Editing with a Million-Scale Dataset
Abstract: Although recent 3D generative models produce increasingly realistic assets, controllable 3D asset editing remains challenging. Existing methods are limited by scarce training data, insufficient source-aware modeling, and a lack of practical evaluation protocols. To address these limitations, we present Alchemy3D, a unified framework for training and evaluating versatile 3D asset editors that covers data construction, model architecture, and benchmark evaluation. Specifically, we curate Alchemy3D-1M, a large-scale 3D editing dataset containing 1.25M assets and 1.38M editing pairs across seven editing types. On this data, we train a family of generative flow models for general-purpose 3D asset editing. The model family supports image- and text-conditioned editing, few-step inference, and transfer to multi-view 3D part segmentation. We further introduce GEdit3D-Bench, a large-scale, open-world benchmark with a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol. Across existing and newly introduced benchmarks, our method outperforms prior methods on most metrics of editing fidelity, source preservation, and visual quality.
StoryEngine improves coherence and consistency in video storytelling
StoryEngine: A State-Grounded Agentic Framework for Video Storytelling
Abstract: Despite recent progress in agentic multi-shot video generation, producing coherent and consistent long-form stories remains challenging. Existing agentic pipelines typically rely on textual shot plans or previously generated pixels, yet lack an explicit mechanism for propagating the consequences of story events and maintaining the video world state across shots. As a result, missing visual details may be reconstructed inaccurately, while visual drift may propagate across subsequent shots, undermining both narrative coherence and visual consistency. To address these challenges, we propose StoryEngine, a state-grounded agentic framework for video storytelling. StoryEngine establishes a separation between authoritative semantic plans and unreliable visual observations. Specifically, StoryEngine maintains a structured representation of entity placement and story-relevant states, and propagates event-induced changes to define the intended start and end states of each shot. To visually realize these states, StoryEngine constructs canonical references for recurring entities and environments, and compiles state and visual constraints into executable render plans. Meanwhile, to realize these states correctly, a bounded evaluation-guided repair loop further corrects local state inconsistencies. Together, these mechanisms preserve causal story progression and prevent local visual errors from propagating across shots. To comprehensively evaluate long-form storytelling, we construct a benchmark across diverse scenarios and visual styles, with metrics assessing storytelling quality, narrative coherence, and visual consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that StoryEngine consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all evaluation dimensions, validating its effectiveness for coherent and consistent video storytelling.
Human motion prediction improved with graph structured flow matching
Skeletons in Flow: Graph Structured Flow Matching for Human Motion Prediction
Abstract: Human motion prediction requires diverse future trajectories that remain consistent with observed motion and the articulated physical structure of the body. Skeletal constraints restrict individual poses, while coordinated motion depends on spatial interactions (between connected joints) and temporal interactions (between time instants). To facilitate human motion prediction in light of these constraints and interactions, we introduce Graph Structured Flow Matching (GSFM), which transports the complete future skeletal trajectory through a single conditional velocity field. The trajectory produces a spatiotemporal skeleton graph, and spatial and temporal attention couple its evolution according to skeletal relations and physical time offsets. Bone directions lie on unit spheres relative to a root joint, and tangent evolution preserves input bone lengths throughout generation. We train a learned velocity field through conditional flow matching along geodesic paths connecting random trajectories centered on the last-observed pose to recorded future trajectories. Experiments on the Archive of Motion capture As Surface Shapes (AMASS) dataset evaluate prediction accuracy, diversity calibration, and motion statistics. We demonstrate the contributions of spatial and temporal message passing in the developed architecture through an ablation study. GSFM models trained on AMASS also perform competitively on the Human3.6M skeleton without parameter updates or retraining, demonstrating applicability to an unseen skeletal structure.
ClearGS improves 3D scene reconstruction from shaky phone videos
ClearGS: Reliability-Aware Gaussian Splatting from Handheld Videos
Abstract: We present ClearGS for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) from handheld videos with uneven viewpoint coverage and mixed frame quality. Rather than selecting frames with binary decisions, ClearGS uses Reliability-aware View Allocation (RVA) to assign graded raw-supervision weights based on appearance reliability, degradation risk, and geometric utility, while weakly reactivating useful suppressed frames to maintain trajectory coverage. Since weighting cannot restore details lost to blur or distortion, ClearGS further introduces Render-Guided In-Video Restoration (RIVR). The current 3DGS render provides a pose-aligned structural candidate, a frozen no-reference restoration expert restores the corresponding raw video observation without any clean reference image, and no-reference perceptual scores select among the render, restored observation, and high-frequency fused candidate. ClearGS then applies Full-Trajectory Repair Consolidation to revisit accepted repairs and preserve details introduced early. On GS2E and GSOTM, ClearGS achieves state-of-the-art overall performance, with consistent CLIP-IQA and MUSIQ gains and LPIPS reductions in most degradation settings, without paired sharp supervision or matched clean references.
Motion style slider controls human motion style intensity smoothly
Motion Style Slider: Endpoint-Supervised Continuous Style Control for Human Motion Diffusion
Abstract: Existing human motion diffusion methods provide strong motion generation quality, and recent style transfer models can inject target style cues, but fine-grained continuous control of style intensity remains underexplored. In production, style intensity is subjective across artists and directors, so the practical requirement is not a universal absolute unit, but a reliable monotonic control axis. We propose Motion Style Slider, a motion-to-motion style transfer framework for endpoint-supervised continuous control. Given a content motion and a style motion, we construct a style direction in a learned motion-style embedding space and condition diffusion generation with a scalar intensity. The training objective combines diffusion denoising with latent intensity regularization to encourage smooth and monotonic style scaling without requiring intermediate-intensity ground-truth motions. Our framework is compatible with pretrained motion diffusion backbones and supports heterogeneous style datasets, including the multi-actor style motion dataset. To test out-of-range usability, we additionally introduce a small real-capture over-reaction extension and evaluate large-intensity behavior against these unseen targets. Experiments measure controllability, interpolation/extrapolation behavior, content preservation, and motion realism, with ablations on direction construction and loss design.
Latent dataset distillation improves human motion prediction models
Latent Dataset Distillation for Human Motion Prediction
Abstract: Dataset distillation (DD) compresses a large training set into a compact synthetic set while preserving downstream training utility. Although DD has been widely studied for images and recently extended to time-series forecasting, its application to human motion prediction remains largely unexplored. Human motion is high-dimensional and structurally coupled, and gradient matching (GM) in the original motion space optimizes many correlated variables without a prior on pose plausibility or temporal dynamics, which frequently yields implausible and unstable synthetic motions. To address this limitation, we propose a latent DD framework that regularizes distillation with a learned motion prior. Motions are first compressed by a residual-quantized variational autoencoder (RVQ-VAE), and distillation then updates only a learnable latent bank through the frozen quantizer and decoder. The pretrained decoder restricts synthetic motions to its output space, while residual quantization progressively refines the latent approximation across multiple codebooks and alleviates the representational bottleneck of single-stage vector quantization. Experiments on Human3.6M, CMU, and 3DPW with two prediction backbones show that the proposed framework outperforms direct GM in 27 of 30 evaluated settings and random subsets in every setting, and produces visibly more plausible synthetic motions in qualitative comparisons.
Video generation agents improve quality by using external tools
VideoGen-Agent: Reinforcing Video Generation Agents
Abstract: Recent advances in video generative models have enabled high-fidelity, temporally coherent video generation. However, these models often struggle to satisfy prompts requiring specialized knowledge, specific identities, physical consistency, or ordered events. In this paper, we present VideoGen-Agent, a multimodal agent trained through multitask agentic reinforcement learning to use external tools for video generation. The agent coordinates augmentation, generation, and verification tools through multi-turn interactions, using the prompt and intermediate observations to guide its decisions. We train a shared policy on a category-balanced dataset spanning six tasks. Supervised fine-tuning on teacher-generated trajectories establishes tool-use behavior, which is then refined through reinforcement learning. A category-aware hybrid reward evaluates tool-call validity, task-appropriate tool use, and generated video quality. We further introduce VABench, a held-out benchmark of 600 prompts covering procedural knowledge, single- and multi-entity identity preservation, physical consistency, scene composition, and multi-shot temporal structure. On VABench, VideoGen-Agent improves over its base text-to-video generator by 19.1 points, from 56.5 to 75.6. Upgrading the generation tools further raises the score to 86.1 without additional agent training. Human raters prefer the upgraded configuration over the strongest standalone baseline in 84.3% of comparisons. These results support learning tool use across video-generation tasks and show that the trained agent can benefit from subsequent advances in generation tools.
Vibeavatar improves realistic talking avatar lip sync and motion quality
VibeAvatar: Aligning Phonetic Kinematics and Human Aesthetics for High-Fidelity Talking Avatar Synthesis
Abstract: Multi-modal talking avatar synthesis aims to generate realistic talking videos from a reference portrait and speech. Despite rapid progress in diffusion-based methods, existing approaches still struggle to jointly achieve accurate lip articulation, human-preferred motion aesthetics, and efficient inference. We observe that phonetic accuracy and motion aesthetics arise from fundamentally different sources and should be addressed at complementary stages rather than learned implicitly by a single generator. Based on this insight, we propose VibeAvatar, which disentangles these two objectives through a Phonetic Kinematics Adapter (PKA) that converts recognition-oriented speech features into phonetic-kinematic conditions at the conditioning stage, and an Aesthetic Motion Policy (AMP) that optimizes a flow-consistent stochastic sampling policy via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) at the post-training stage. With a lightweight flow-based motion generator operating in a compact 1D warp-based latent motion space, VibeAvatar achieves state-of-the-art results in articulation, aesthetics, and efficiency on both objective metrics and user studies, while generating a 10-second 512px video in under 10 seconds with only $\sim$3GB VRAM.
KaiNinja extends 3D image generators to create separate parts quickly
Kaininja: Extending Native 3D Generators to the Part Level
Abstract: Native 3D generators turn one image into a single mesh. TRELLIS.2 and its peers deliver high-fidelity non-watertight geometry with materials, but the output is one fused object, while downstream work such as editing, rigging and simulation operates on part-level assets. A naive idea is to run a 3D segmentation network on the fused mesh that TRELLIS.2 generates, but such pipelines are slow and bounded by the accuracy of the segmentation. We want a simple way to extend an existing native 3D generator to the part level. But we face a critical problem: the O-Voxel grid stores one sheet of surface per voxel, so a single volume cannot represent the interface where two parts touch, at any resolution. We introduce a dual-volume representation to solve this problem and put forward KaiNinja, a part-level extension of TRELLIS.2 built on a dual-volume form of its O-Voxel representation. KaiNinja keeps the generation speed and quality of TRELLIS.2 while extending it to the part level, with no mask or segmenter in the pipeline. Its training data come from sources of many kinds, including CAD models and assets authored by an LLM-driven agent; to our knowledge it is the first 3D generative model trained on agent-authored part data. Surprisingly, we also find that whole-object fidelity improves over the same backbone fine-tuned on the same dataset. Against part generation pipelines of different paradigms, it lowers whole-object Chamfer distance by 40% and raises strict part F-score by 16%.
Motion style transfers adapt to different body shapes without losing detail
MorphoStyle: Motion Style Transfer with Morphology Control
Abstract: Human motion may be viewed as a combination of action content, style, and body morphology. Existing motion style transfer methods transfer a reference style onto a content motion while assuming a canonical body, whereas shape-aware motion generators adapt motion to a target shape without explicit style control. This separation of motion style and shape (morphology) makes it difficult to generate stylized motions for non-canonical bodies; naively combining a style transfer module with a shape-aware generator often leaks action content from the style reference and disrupts shape-consistent kinematics. We present MorphoStyle, a framework for shape-aware motion style transfer that is built on a shape-conditioned Finite-Scalar-Quantization Variational Auto-Encoder (FSQ-VAE). The key contribution is to pose the desired style transfer as modular latent disentanglement comprising: (i) a contrastive style encoder that extracts content-decoupled style embeddings; (ii) a text-guided style-routing mechanism that locates style-relevant joints in a text-motion feature space; and (iii) a manifold preserving style modulator that injects discriminative style embeddings in content features as a temporally-gated low-rank offset. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MorphoStyle outperforms competing baselines in terms of both shape control and motion style transfer, while simultaneously providing quantitative shape control. For more details, please see project website: https://github.com/funkdub/MorphoStyle.
New fabric dataset and simulator improve persistent wrinkle modeling
Learnable Persistent Wrinkle Formation in Cloth Simulation
Abstract: The mechanical memory of fabrics often leads to persistent wrinkles, which reflect key physical properties and habitual wear patterns. Simulating these wrinkles accurately is essential for visual plausibility in digital garments, yet no dedicated approach exists for inferring the parameters that govern their formation due to the lack of precise datasets and estimation methods. We introduce Fabric-101, an inclusive, accurate, and extendable fabric dataset comprising over 101 common fabrics following textile standards. Unlike existing datasets, it captures three physically distinct deformation components (i.e., self-recoverable (elastic), recoverable (friction-driven), and unrecoverable (plastic)), from cyclic loading-unloading measurements. Building on this data, we propose a differentiable cloth simulator combining an elasto-plastic model with friction, designed to capture recoverable and unrecoverable wrinkle formation. Our simulator is differentiable and uses adjoint method to learn fabric physical parameters from the measured hysteresis curves, learning fabric-specific wrinkle behaviors. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our model reproduces persistent wrinkles that are visually and physically similar to real fabrics across diverse materials and motions. Dataset and code are available in https://github.com/GongDeshan/Fabric_101_for_Wrinkles.
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.
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