new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Nov 10

Fatigue-PINN: Physics-Informed Fatigue-Driven Motion Modulation and Synthesis

Fatigue modeling is essential for motion synthesis tasks to model human motions under fatigued conditions and biomechanical engineering applications, such as investigating the variations in movement patterns and posture due to fatigue, defining injury risk mitigation and prevention strategies, formulating fatigue minimization schemes and creating improved ergonomic designs. Nevertheless, employing data-driven methods for synthesizing the impact of fatigue on motion, receives little to no attention in the literature. In this work, we present Fatigue-PINN, a deep learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks, for modeling fatigued human movements, while providing joint-specific fatigue configurations for adaptation and mitigation of motion artifacts on a joint level, resulting in more realistic animations. To account for muscle fatigue, we simulate the fatigue-induced fluctuations in the maximum exerted joint torques by leveraging a PINN adaptation of the Three-Compartment Controller model to exploit physics-domain knowledge for improving accuracy. This model also introduces parametric motion alignment with respect to joint-specific fatigue, hence avoiding sharp frame transitions. Our results indicate that Fatigue-PINN accurately simulates the effects of externally perceived fatigue on open-type human movements being consistent with findings from real-world experimental fatigue studies. Since fatigue is incorporated in torque space, Fatigue-PINN provides an end-to-end encoder-decoder-like architecture, to ensure transforming joint angles to joint torques and vice-versa, thus, being compatible with motion synthesis frameworks operating on joint angles.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 26, 2025

LottieGPT: Tokenizing Vector Animation for Autoregressive Generation

Despite rapid progress in video generation, existing models are incapable of producing vector animation, a dominant and highly expressive form of multimedia on the Internet. Vector animations offer resolution-independence, compactness, semantic structure, and editable parametric motion representations, yet current generative models operate exclusively in raster space and thus cannot synthesize them. Meanwhile, recent advances in large multimodal models demonstrate strong capabilities in generating structured data such as slides, 3D meshes, LEGO sequences, and indoor layouts, suggesting that native vector animation generation may be achievable. In this work, we present the first framework for tokenizing and autoregressively generating vector animations. We adopt Lottie, a widely deployed JSON-based animation standard, and design a tailored Lottie Tokenizer that encodes layered geometric primitives, transforms, and keyframe-based motion into a compact and semantically aligned token sequence. To support large-scale training, we also construct LottieAnimation-660K, the largest and most diverse vector animation dataset to date, consisting of 660k real-world Lottie animation and 15M static Lottie image files curated from broad Internet sources. Building upon these components, we finetune Qwen-VL to create LottieGPT, a native multimodal model capable of generating coherent, editable vector animations directly from natural language or visual prompts. Experiments show that our tokenizer dramatically reduces sequence length while preserving structural fidelity, enabling effective autoregressive learning of dynamic vector content. LottieGPT exhibits strong generalization across diverse animation styles and outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on SVG generation (a special case of single-frame vector animation).

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 12

MagicPortrait: Temporally Consistent Face Reenactment with 3D Geometric Guidance

In this study, we propose a method for video face reenactment that integrates a 3D face parametric model into a latent diffusion framework, aiming to improve shape consistency and motion control in existing video-based face generation approaches. Our approach employs the FLAME (Faces Learned with an Articulated Model and Expressions) model as the 3D face parametric representation, providing a unified framework for modeling face expressions and head pose. This not only enables precise extraction of motion features from driving videos, but also contributes to the faithful preservation of face shape and geometry. Specifically, we enhance the latent diffusion model with rich 3D expression and detailed pose information by incorporating depth maps, normal maps, and rendering maps derived from FLAME sequences. These maps serve as motion guidance and are encoded into the denoising UNet through a specifically designed Geometric Guidance Encoder (GGE). A multi-layer feature fusion module with integrated self-attention mechanisms is used to combine facial appearance and motion latent features within the spatial domain. By utilizing the 3D face parametric model as motion guidance, our method enables parametric alignment of face identity between the reference image and the motion captured from the driving video. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method excels at generating high-quality face animations with precise expression and head pose variation modeling. In addition, it demonstrates strong generalization performance on out-of-domain images. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/weimengting/MagicPortrait.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

FaceTalk: Audio-Driven Motion Diffusion for Neural Parametric Head Models

We introduce FaceTalk, a novel generative approach designed for synthesizing high-fidelity 3D motion sequences of talking human heads from input audio signal. To capture the expressive, detailed nature of human heads, including hair, ears, and finer-scale eye movements, we propose to couple speech signal with the latent space of neural parametric head models to create high-fidelity, temporally coherent motion sequences. We propose a new latent diffusion model for this task, operating in the expression space of neural parametric head models, to synthesize audio-driven realistic head sequences. In the absence of a dataset with corresponding NPHM expressions to audio, we optimize for these correspondences to produce a dataset of temporally-optimized NPHM expressions fit to audio-video recordings of people talking. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a generative approach for realistic and high-quality motion synthesis of volumetric human heads, representing a significant advancement in the field of audio-driven 3D animation. Notably, our approach stands out in its ability to generate plausible motion sequences that can produce high-fidelity head animation coupled with the NPHM shape space. Our experimental results substantiate the effectiveness of FaceTalk, consistently achieving superior and visually natural motion, encompassing diverse facial expressions and styles, outperforming existing methods by 75% in perceptual user study evaluation.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 13, 2023

DirtyMoCap: Robust Motion Capture from Unconstrained Markers

Optical motion capture delivers high-fidelity human motion, but its reliance on strict marker layouts and clean trajectories severely limits its real-world applicability. In practice, tracking systems frequently output unconstrained markers: sparse, noisy, and unordered point clouds with unknown or varying configurations. To bridge the gap between corrupted raw markers and parametric human models, we introduce DirtyMoCap, a robust, marker-layout-free framework. Our core insight is to map unordered marker observations to a fixed set of "proxy anchors" comprising skeletal joints and body surface points, which serve as a stable intermediate representation. We first initialize and track these anchors over long sequences using a recurrent sliding-window architecture. Then, a custom differentiable Gauss-Newton solver fits the SMPL-H model to the tracked anchors to recover full-body pose, translation, and shape. By explicitly deriving geometric residuals, our solver learns adaptive observation confidence, smoothness, and prior weights end-to-end, adapting dynamically to the reliability of the input data. Extensive experiments on diverse, noisy marker configurations demonstrate that DirtyMoCap successfully generalizes across arbitrary layouts using only a single trained model. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art configuration-specific baselines in both joint and vertex reconstruction accuracy, while our custom CUDA solver achieves up to a 100x speedup over standard PyTorch implementations. We further apply DirtyMoCap to heterogeneous raw optical MoCap recordings of traditional Chinese martial arts, yielding a Kung Fu motion dataset of temporally coherent SMPL-H reconstructions. Code and data are available at https://wanglongzju.github.io/DirtyMoCap-Project-Page.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 17

Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance

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

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024 2

HACK: Learning a Parametric Head and Neck Model for High-fidelity Animation

Significant advancements have been made in developing parametric models for digital humans, with various approaches concentrating on parts such as the human body, hand, or face. Nevertheless, connectors such as the neck have been overlooked in these models, with rich anatomical priors often unutilized. In this paper, we introduce HACK (Head-And-neCK), a novel parametric model for constructing the head and cervical region of digital humans. Our model seeks to disentangle the full spectrum of neck and larynx motions, facial expressions, and appearance variations, providing personalized and anatomically consistent controls, particularly for the neck regions. To build our HACK model, we acquire a comprehensive multi-modal dataset of the head and neck under various facial expressions. We employ a 3D ultrasound imaging scheme to extract the inner biomechanical structures, namely the precise 3D rotation information of the seven vertebrae of the cervical spine. We then adopt a multi-view photometric approach to capture the geometry and physically-based textures of diverse subjects, who exhibit a diverse range of static expressions as well as sequential head-and-neck movements. Using the multi-modal dataset, we train the parametric HACK model by separating the 3D head and neck depiction into various shape, pose, expression, and larynx blendshapes from the neutral expression and the rest skeletal pose. We adopt an anatomically-consistent skeletal design for the cervical region, and the expression is linked to facial action units for artist-friendly controls. HACK addresses the head and neck as a unified entity, offering more accurate and expressive controls, with a new level of realism, particularly for the neck regions. This approach has significant benefits for numerous applications and enables inter-correlation analysis between head and neck for fine-grained motion synthesis and transfer.

  • 10 authors
·
May 8, 2023

3D-Aware Implicit Motion Control for View-Adaptive Human Video Generation

Existing methods for human motion control in video generation typically rely on either 2D poses or explicit 3D parametric models (e.g., SMPL) as control signals. However, 2D poses rigidly bind motion to the driving viewpoint, precluding novel-view synthesis. Explicit 3D models, though structurally informative, suffer from inherent inaccuracies (e.g., depth ambiguity and inaccurate dynamics) which, when used as a strong constraint, override the powerful intrinsic 3D awareness of large-scale video generators. In this work, we revisit motion control from a 3D-aware perspective, advocating for an implicit, view-agnostic motion representation that naturally aligns with the generator's spatial priors rather than depending on externally reconstructed constraints. We introduce 3DiMo, which jointly trains a motion encoder with a pretrained video generator to distill driving frames into compact, view-agnostic motion tokens, injected semantically via cross-attention. To foster 3D awareness, we train with view-rich supervision (i.e., single-view, multi-view, and moving-camera videos), forcing motion consistency across diverse viewpoints. Additionally, we use auxiliary geometric supervision that leverages SMPL only for early initialization and is annealed to zero, enabling the model to transition from external 3D guidance to learning genuine 3D spatial motion understanding from the data and the generator's priors. Experiments confirm that 3DiMo faithfully reproduces driving motions with flexible, text-driven camera control, significantly surpassing existing methods in both motion fidelity and visual quality.

UV Gaussians: Joint Learning of Mesh Deformation and Gaussian Textures for Human Avatar Modeling

Reconstructing photo-realistic drivable human avatars from multi-view image sequences has been a popular and challenging topic in the field of computer vision and graphics. While existing NeRF-based methods can achieve high-quality novel view rendering of human models, both training and inference processes are time-consuming. Recent approaches have utilized 3D Gaussians to represent the human body, enabling faster training and rendering. However, they undermine the importance of the mesh guidance and directly predict Gaussians in 3D space with coarse mesh guidance. This hinders the learning procedure of the Gaussians and tends to produce blurry textures. Therefore, we propose UV Gaussians, which models the 3D human body by jointly learning mesh deformations and 2D UV-space Gaussian textures. We utilize the embedding of UV map to learn Gaussian textures in 2D space, leveraging the capabilities of powerful 2D networks to extract features. Additionally, through an independent Mesh network, we optimize pose-dependent geometric deformations, thereby guiding Gaussian rendering and significantly enhancing rendering quality. We collect and process a new dataset of human motion, which includes multi-view images, scanned models, parametric model registration, and corresponding texture maps. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art synthesis of novel view and novel pose. The code and data will be made available on the homepage https://alex-jyj.github.io/UV-Gaussians/ once the paper is accepted.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

Multi-marginal Schrödinger Bridges with Iterative Reference Refinement

Practitioners frequently aim to infer an unobserved population trajectory using sample snapshots at multiple time points. For instance, in single-cell sequencing, scientists would like to learn how gene expression evolves over time. But sequencing any cell destroys that cell. So we cannot access any cell's full trajectory, but we can access snapshot samples from many cells. Stochastic differential equations are commonly used to analyze systems with full individual-trajectory access; since here we have only sample snapshots, these methods are inapplicable. The deep learning community has recently explored using Schr\"odinger bridges (SBs) and their extensions to estimate these dynamics. However, these methods either (1) interpolate between just two time points or (2) require a single fixed reference dynamic within the SB, which is often just set to be Brownian motion. But learning piecewise from adjacent time points can fail to capture long-term dependencies. And practitioners are typically able to specify a model class for the reference dynamic but not the exact values of the parameters within it. So we propose a new method that (1) learns the unobserved trajectories from sample snapshots across multiple time points and (2) requires specification only of a class of reference dynamics, not a single fixed one. In particular, we suggest an iterative projection method inspired by Schr\"odinger bridges; we alternate between learning a piecewise SB on the unobserved trajectories and using the learned SB to refine our best guess for the dynamics within the reference class. We demonstrate the advantages of our method via a well-known simulated parametric model from ecology, simulated and real data from systems biology, and real motion-capture data.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 12, 2024

Hallo: Hierarchical Audio-Driven Visual Synthesis for Portrait Image Animation

The field of portrait image animation, driven by speech audio input, has experienced significant advancements in the generation of realistic and dynamic portraits. This research delves into the complexities of synchronizing facial movements and creating visually appealing, temporally consistent animations within the framework of diffusion-based methodologies. Moving away from traditional paradigms that rely on parametric models for intermediate facial representations, our innovative approach embraces the end-to-end diffusion paradigm and introduces a hierarchical audio-driven visual synthesis module to enhance the precision of alignment between audio inputs and visual outputs, encompassing lip, expression, and pose motion. Our proposed network architecture seamlessly integrates diffusion-based generative models, a UNet-based denoiser, temporal alignment techniques, and a reference network. The proposed hierarchical audio-driven visual synthesis offers adaptive control over expression and pose diversity, enabling more effective personalization tailored to different identities. Through a comprehensive evaluation that incorporates both qualitative and quantitative analyses, our approach demonstrates obvious enhancements in image and video quality, lip synchronization precision, and motion diversity. Further visualization and access to the source code can be found at: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/hallo.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

S3O: A Dual-Phase Approach for Reconstructing Dynamic Shape and Skeleton of Articulated Objects from Single Monocular Video

Reconstructing dynamic articulated objects from a singular monocular video is challenging, requiring joint estimation of shape, motion, and camera parameters from limited views. Current methods typically demand extensive computational resources and training time, and require additional human annotations such as predefined parametric models, camera poses, and key points, limiting their generalizability. We propose Synergistic Shape and Skeleton Optimization (S3O), a novel two-phase method that forgoes these prerequisites and efficiently learns parametric models including visible shapes and underlying skeletons. Conventional strategies typically learn all parameters simultaneously, leading to interdependencies where a single incorrect prediction can result in significant errors. In contrast, S3O adopts a phased approach: it first focuses on learning coarse parametric models, then progresses to motion learning and detail addition. This method substantially lowers computational complexity and enhances robustness in reconstruction from limited viewpoints, all without requiring additional annotations. To address the current inadequacies in 3D reconstruction from monocular video benchmarks, we collected the PlanetZoo dataset. Our experimental evaluations on standard benchmarks and the PlanetZoo dataset affirm that S3O provides more accurate 3D reconstruction, and plausible skeletons, and reduces the training time by approximately 60% compared to the state-of-the-art, thus advancing the state of the art in dynamic object reconstruction.

  • 4 authors
·
May 21, 2024

AbsoluteDegradation: A Physics-Inspired Synthetic Film-Degradation Pipeline and Archival Film Restoration Benchmark

Restoring archival film remains a fundamentally challenging problem due to the absence of paired training data and the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks. Pristine versions of deteriorated footage are physically unrecoverable, requiring supervised methods to rely on synthetic data that often fail to capture the complex, temporally coherent nature of real film degradation. At the same time, existing real-world datasets are limited in scale, quality, and accessibility, hindering reliable evaluation and fair comparison across methods. We address both limitations with AbsoluteDegradation, a physics-inspired, modular pipeline for synthesizing realistic film degradations, and a new large-scale archival benchmark. The proposed pipeline models the analog-to-digital process as a structured composition of artifact families, incorporating signal-dependent grain, parametric scratches, and temporally coherent camera motion, enabling controlled generation of diverse degradation regimes. In parallel, we introduce a curated dataset of 81,576 high-resolution frames sourced from real archival footage, designed for consistent evaluation under real-world conditions. Together, these contributions provide a unified framework for training and benchmarking restoration models. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures show that models trained with AbsoluteDegradation generalize better to real-world footage, while the proposed benchmark reveals systematic failure modes of current methods. We hope this work establishes a foundation for reproducible and domain-authentic evaluation in archival film restoration.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 1

SOMA: From Surface Observations to Muscle Anatomy

With the growing demand for realistic virtual humans, parametric body models have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, sports, and entertainment applications. However, most of these models are inherently limited: they only capture the 3D surface of the skin, offering no insight into the complex bio-mechanical structures that generate motion. As more applications expand towards biomechanics, the need for virtual human models that go beyond the skin has become increasingly evident. Traditional soft-tissue simulations, such as FEM, are accurate but non-scalable and too computationally expensive for most common applications. Alternatively, existing biomechanical tools can simulate muscular forces and activations, but do not model changes in external shape, restricting how activations correlate with actual observable anatomy. This motivates a novel inverse research problem: recovering muscle deformations directly from visible surface observations - i.e., from the skin, and thus the pose. In this work, we present SOMA (from Surface Observations to Muscle Anatomy), a person-specific model that infers spatio-temporal muscle behavior from surface signals obtained using RGB cameras, and SKIM, a subject-specific soft-tissue deformation dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that attempts to recover muscle deformations from multi-view RGB data. We show how our method provides anatomically grounded animations without the complexity of traditional simulations, leading to a scalable and cost-effective solution. Data and code are available.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 14

Grasp-and-Lift: Executable 3D Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction via Physics-in-the-Loop Optimization

Dexterous hand manipulation increasingly relies on large-scale motion datasets with precise hand-object trajectory data. However, existing resources such as DexYCB and HO3D are primarily optimized for visual alignment but often yield physically implausible interactions when replayed in physics simulators, including penetration, missed contact, and unstable grasps. We propose a simulation-in-the-loop refinement framework that converts these visually aligned trajectories into physically executable ones. Our core contribution is to formulate this as a tractable black-box optimization problem. We parameterize the hand's motion using a low-dimensional, spline-based representation built on sparse temporal keyframes. This allows us to use a powerful gradient-free optimizer, CMA-ES, to treat the high-fidelity physics engine as a black-box objective function. Our method finds motions that simultaneously maximize physical success (e.g., stable grasp and lift) while minimizing deviation from the original human demonstration. Compared to MANIPTRANS-recent transfer pipelines, our approach achieves lower hand and object pose errors during replay and more accurately recovers hand-object physical interactions. Our approach provides a general and scalable method for converting visual demonstrations into physically valid trajectories, enabling the generation of high-fidelity data crucial for robust policy learning.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 25

ShapeFusion: A 3D diffusion model for localized shape editing

In the realm of 3D computer vision, parametric models have emerged as a ground-breaking methodology for the creation of realistic and expressive 3D avatars. Traditionally, they rely on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), given its ability to decompose data to an orthonormal space that maximally captures shape variations. However, due to the orthogonality constraints and the global nature of PCA's decomposition, these models struggle to perform localized and disentangled editing of 3D shapes, which severely affects their use in applications requiring fine control such as face sculpting. In this paper, we leverage diffusion models to enable diverse and fully localized edits on 3D meshes, while completely preserving the un-edited regions. We propose an effective diffusion masking training strategy that, by design, facilitates localized manipulation of any shape region, without being limited to predefined regions or to sparse sets of predefined control vertices. Following our framework, a user can explicitly set their manipulation region of choice and define an arbitrary set of vertices as handles to edit a 3D mesh. Compared to the current state-of-the-art our method leads to more interpretable shape manipulations than methods relying on latent code state, greater localization and generation diversity while offering faster inference than optimization based approaches. Project page: https://rolpotamias.github.io/Shapefusion/

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

Admissible Velocity Propagation : Beyond Quasi-Static Path Planning for High-Dimensional Robots

Path-velocity decomposition is an intuitive yet powerful approach to address the complexity of kinodynamic motion planning. The difficult trajectory planning problem is solved in two separate, simpler, steps: first, find a path in the configuration space that satisfies the geometric constraints (path planning), and second, find a time-parameterization of that path satisfying the kinodynamic constraints. A fundamental requirement is that the path found in the first step should be time-parameterizable. Most existing works fulfill this requirement by enforcing quasi-static constraints in the path planning step, resulting in an important loss in completeness. We propose a method that enables path-velocity decomposition to discover truly dynamic motions, i.e. motions that are not quasi-statically executable. At the heart of the proposed method is a new algorithm -- Admissible Velocity Propagation -- which, given a path and an interval of reachable velocities at the beginning of that path, computes exactly and efficiently the interval of all the velocities the system can reach after traversing the path while respecting the system kinodynamic constraints. Combining this algorithm with usual sampling-based planners then gives rise to a family of new trajectory planners that can appropriately handle kinodynamic constraints while retaining the advantages associated with path-velocity decomposition. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on some difficult kinodynamic planning problems, where, in particular, quasi-static methods are guaranteed to fail.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 29, 2016

Joints, Camera, Action! Co-Generating 3D Motion and Video for Arbitrary Rigs

Video generation models can now depict remarkably realistic motion. Yet it is unclear how to use this motion beyond pixels: to animate a specific 3D asset and replay the animation in its 3D scene. For instance, a video model can show a monkey jumping over a crossbar, but it cannot return that jump as replayable 3D motion placed in the 3D scene. Here we present a model that directly co-generates the video and 3D motion for any supplied rig, along with a camera that registers this motion to the scene. Prior video-motion models either handle only human skeletons, often adding billions of parameters, or triangulate 3D motion from generated 2D pose maps. We instead keep 3D motion in a separate model that supports arbitrary skeletons, and connect it to a pretrained video model through a small set of cross-attention layers. This separation lets the motion model first learn how skeletons move from motion-only data, which is easier to obtain and augment than paired video. Additionally, our model learns to locate each joint in the video frames, which lets us recover the camera and place the 3D motion in the scene. To train across many skeletons, we use a generative video editor to place animated 3D assets in scenes suited to their actions, curating the edits so their known motion remains valid. Together with human and robot video, this yields nearly 200K training pairs. Our evaluations demonstrate that our model animates diverse rigs from text more faithfully than video-first pipelines, and its motion responds to the surrounding scene. It also turns video into rig motion, rig motion into video, and enables keyframe-based control of the 3D motion. Videos and additional results are available on our project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/projects/jca/.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Oct 19 2

In-2-4D: Inbetweening from Two Single-View Images to 4D Generation

We propose a new problem, In-2-4D, for generative 4D (i.e., 3D + motion) inbetweening from a minimalistic input setting: two single-view images capturing an object in two distinct motion states. Given two images representing the start and end states of an object in motion, our goal is to generate and reconstruct the motion in 4D. We utilize a video interpolation model to predict the motion, but large frame-to-frame motions can lead to ambiguous interpretations. To overcome this, we employ a hierarchical approach to identify keyframes that are visually close to the input states and show significant motion, then generate smooth fragments between them. For each fragment, we construct the 3D representation of the keyframe using Gaussian Splatting. The temporal frames within the fragment guide the motion, enabling their transformation into dynamic Gaussians through a deformation field. To improve temporal consistency and refine 3D motion, we expand the self-attention of multi-view diffusion across timesteps and apply rigid transformation regularization. Finally, we merge the independently generated 3D motion segments by interpolating boundary deformation fields and optimizing them to align with the guiding video, ensuring smooth and flicker-free transitions. Through extensive qualitative and quantitiave experiments as well as a user study, we show the effectiveness of our method and its components. The project page is available at https://in-2-4d.github.io/

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 11, 2025 2

A 5-Point Minimal Solver for Event Camera Relative Motion Estimation

Event-based cameras are ideal for line-based motion estimation, since they predominantly respond to edges in the scene. However, accurately determining the camera displacement based on events continues to be an open problem. This is because line feature extraction and dynamics estimation are tightly coupled when using event cameras, and no precise model is currently available for describing the complex structures generated by lines in the space-time volume of events. We solve this problem by deriving the correct non-linear parametrization of such manifolds, which we term eventails, and demonstrate its application to event-based linear motion estimation, with known rotation from an Inertial Measurement Unit. Using this parametrization, we introduce a novel minimal 5-point solver that jointly estimates line parameters and linear camera velocity projections, which can be fused into a single, averaged linear velocity when considering multiple lines. We demonstrate on both synthetic and real data that our solver generates more stable relative motion estimates than other methods while capturing more inliers than clustering based on spatio-temporal planes. In particular, our method consistently achieves a 100% success rate in estimating linear velocity where existing closed-form solvers only achieve between 23% and 70%. The proposed eventails contribute to a better understanding of spatio-temporal event-generated geometries and we thus believe it will become a core building block of future event-based motion estimation algorithms.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

A Third-Order Gaussian Process Trajectory Representation Framework with Closed-Form Kinematics for Continuous-Time Motion Estimation

In this paper, we propose a third-order, i.e., white-noise-on-jerk, Gaussian Process (GP) Trajectory Representation (TR) framework for continuous-time (CT) motion estimation (ME) tasks. Our framework features a unified trajectory representation that encapsulates the kinematic models of both SO(3)timesR^3 and SE(3) pose representations. This encapsulation strategy allows users to use the same implementation of measurement-based factors for either choice of pose representation, which facilitates experimentation and comparison to achieve the best model for the ME task. In addition, unique to our framework, we derive the kinematic models with the closed-form temporal derivatives of the local variable of SO(3) and SE(3), which so far has only been approximated based on the Taylor expansion in the literature. Our experiments show that these kinematic models can improve the estimation accuracy in high-speed scenarios. All analytical Jacobians of the interpolated states with respect to the support states of the trajectory representation, as well as the motion prior factors, are also provided for accelerated Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the framework in various motion estimation tasks such as localization, calibration, and odometry, facilitating fast prototyping for ME researchers. We release the source code for the benefit of the community. Our project is available at https://github.com/brytsknguyen/gptr.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

FlexiClip: Locality-Preserving Free-Form Character Animation

Animating clipart images with seamless motion while maintaining visual fidelity and temporal coherence presents significant challenges. Existing methods, such as AniClipart, effectively model spatial deformations but often fail to ensure smooth temporal transitions, resulting in artifacts like abrupt motions and geometric distortions. Similarly, text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models struggle to handle clipart due to the mismatch in statistical properties between natural video and clipart styles. This paper introduces FlexiClip, a novel approach designed to overcome these limitations by addressing the intertwined challenges of temporal consistency and geometric integrity. FlexiClip extends traditional B\'ezier curve-based trajectory modeling with key innovations: temporal Jacobians to correct motion dynamics incrementally, continuous-time modeling via probability flow ODEs (pfODEs) to mitigate temporal noise, and a flow matching loss inspired by GFlowNet principles to optimize smooth motion transitions. These enhancements ensure coherent animations across complex scenarios involving rapid movements and non-rigid deformations. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of FlexiClip in generating animations that are not only smooth and natural but also structurally consistent across diverse clipart types, including humans and animals. By integrating spatial and temporal modeling with pre-trained video diffusion models, FlexiClip sets a new standard for high-quality clipart animation, offering robust performance across a wide range of visual content. Project Page: https://creative-gen.github.io/flexiclip.github.io/

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 15, 2025

From Pixels to Newtons: Predicting In Vivo Joint Contact Forces from Monocular Video

Joint contact forces govern implant longevity, cartilage health, and rehabilitation outcomes, shaping who develops osteoarthritis, who recovers well from joint replacement, and who benefits from biomechanical interventions. Yet they remain measurable only invasively, in a few dozen patients with instrumented implants. I present a physics-free pipeline to predict instantaneous 3D hip and knee contact forces from an uncalibrated monocular video: no markers, force plates, electromyography, subject-specific imaging, or musculoskeletal model. Parametric body meshes are recovered per frame, encoded as kinematic features, and decoded into forces by a transformer whose pose stream is adaptively modulated at every layer by body shape, joint, side, activity text, and self-supervised video tokens (V-JEPA 2), unifying hip and knee in a single model. Under leave-one-subject-out cross-validation across 26 patients and 25 activity categories from the in vivo OrthoLoad database, the pipeline matches the accuracy of subject-specific musculoskeletal simulations (0.32 pm 0.08 BW RMSE for hip; 0.23 pm 0.03 BW for knee) and resolves peak force changes smaller than those reported for gait retraining and osteoarthritis progression. Applied zero-shot to an independent instrumented cohort, it rivals or outperforms prior published methods. Even without curated activity labels, video features alone preserve accuracy and enable end-to-end inference on raw footage. Driven by the predictor, a generative motion prior produces biomechanically plausible variants with reduced peak loading, rediscovering strategies from the predictive simulation literature. This pipeline establishes uncalibrated monocular video as a viable modality for estimating joint loading, opening a path toward retrospective analysis of archived clinical recordings, primary-care screening, and at-home rehabilitation tracking.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 3

Controllable Longer Image Animation with Diffusion Models

Generating realistic animated videos from static images is an important area of research in computer vision. Methods based on physical simulation and motion prediction have achieved notable advances, but they are often limited to specific object textures and motion trajectories, failing to exhibit highly complex environments and physical dynamics. In this paper, we introduce an open-domain controllable image animation method using motion priors with video diffusion models. Our method achieves precise control over the direction and speed of motion in the movable region by extracting the motion field information from videos and learning moving trajectories and strengths. Current pretrained video generation models are typically limited to producing very short videos, typically less than 30 frames. In contrast, we propose an efficient long-duration video generation method based on noise reschedule specifically tailored for image animation tasks, facilitating the creation of videos over 100 frames in length while maintaining consistency in content scenery and motion coordination. Specifically, we decompose the denoise process into two distinct phases: the shaping of scene contours and the refining of motion details. Then we reschedule the noise to control the generated frame sequences maintaining long-distance noise correlation. We conducted extensive experiments with 10 baselines, encompassing both commercial tools and academic methodologies, which demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our project page: https://wangqiang9.github.io/Controllable.github.io/

  • 5 authors
·
May 27, 2024

ViPS: Video-informed Pose Spaces for Auto-Rigged Meshes

Kinematic rigs provide a structured interface for articulating 3D meshes but lack any associated pose space, i.e., an explicit representation of the plausible manifold of joint configurations for a given mesh. Without such a pose space, stochastic sampling or manual manipulation of raw rig parameters easily results in semantic and/or geometric violations, such as anatomical hyperextension and non-physical self-intersections. We propose Video-informed Pose Spaces (ViPS), a feedforward framework that discovers the latent distribution of valid articulations for auto-rigged meshes by distilling motion priors from a pretrained video diffusion model. Unlike existing methods that rely on scarce, artist-authored 4D datasets, or focus on reconstructing instances of individual motions, ViPS transfers generative video model priors into a universal distribution over the given rig parameterization. Differentiable geometric validators applied to the skinned mesh enforce shape-specific integrity without requiring manual regularizers. Our feedforward model reveals a smooth, compact, and controllable pose space. This, in turn, supports sampling for diverse shape variations, manifold projection for inverse kinematics, and temporally coherent trajectories for animation and keyframing. Further, the distilled 3D pose samples serve as semantic proxies to guide video diffusion, effectively closing the loop between generative 2D priors and structured 3D kinematic control. Our evaluations show that ViPS, trained solely using video priors, matches the performance of state-of-the-art models trained on synthetic artist-created 4D data in both plausibility and diversity. Additionally, as a universal model, ViPS exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to out-of-distribution species and unseen skeletal topologies.

  • 9 authors
·
May 19

Optimal-state Dynamics Estimation for Physics-based Human Motion Capture from Videos

Human motion capture from monocular videos has made significant progress in recent years. However, modern approaches often produce temporal artifacts, e.g. in form of jittery motion and struggle to achieve smooth and physically plausible motions. Explicitly integrating physics, in form of internal forces and exterior torques, helps alleviating these artifacts. Current state-of-the-art approaches make use of an automatic PD controller to predict torques and reaction forces in order to re-simulate the input kinematics, i.e. the joint angles of a predefined skeleton. However, due to imperfect physical models, these methods often require simplifying assumptions and extensive preprocessing of the input kinematics to achieve good performance. To this end, we propose a novel method to selectively incorporate the physics models with the kinematics observations in an online setting, inspired by a neural Kalman-filtering approach. We develop a control loop as a meta-PD controller to predict internal joint torques and external reaction forces, followed by a physics-based motion simulation. A recurrent neural network is introduced to realize a Kalman filter that attentively balances the kinematics input and simulated motion, resulting in an optimal-state dynamics prediction. We show that this filtering step is crucial to provide an online supervision that helps balancing the shortcoming of the respective input motions, thus being important for not only capturing accurate global motion trajectories but also producing physically plausible human poses. The proposed approach excels in the physics-based human pose estimation task and demonstrates the physical plausibility of the predictive dynamics, compared to state of the art. The code is available on https://github.com/cuongle1206/OSDCap

  • 4 authors
·
May 13, 2025

MoCapAnything: Unified 3D Motion Capture for Arbitrary Skeletons from Monocular Videos

Motion capture now underpins content creation far beyond digital humans, yet most existing pipelines remain species- or template-specific. We formalize this gap as Category-Agnostic Motion Capture (CAMoCap): given a monocular video and an arbitrary rigged 3D asset as a prompt, the goal is to reconstruct a rotation-based animation such as BVH that directly drives the specific asset. We present MoCapAnything, a reference-guided, factorized framework that first predicts 3D joint trajectories and then recovers asset-specific rotations via constraint-aware inverse kinematics. The system contains three learnable modules and a lightweight IK stage: (1) a Reference Prompt Encoder that extracts per-joint queries from the asset's skeleton, mesh, and rendered images; (2) a Video Feature Extractor that computes dense visual descriptors and reconstructs a coarse 4D deforming mesh to bridge the gap between video and joint space; and (3) a Unified Motion Decoder that fuses these cues to produce temporally coherent trajectories. We also curate Truebones Zoo with 1038 motion clips, each providing a standardized skeleton-mesh-render triad. Experiments on both in-domain benchmarks and in-the-wild videos show that MoCapAnything delivers high-quality skeletal animations and exhibits meaningful cross-species retargeting across heterogeneous rigs, enabling scalable, prompt-driven 3D motion capture for arbitrary assets. Project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/MoCapAnything/

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025 3

Ultrafast Sampling-based Kinodynamic Planning via Differential Flatness

Motion planning under dynamics constraints, i.e., kinodynamic planning, enables safe robot operation by generating dynamically feasible trajectories that the robot can accurately track. For high-\dof robots such as manipulators, sampling-based motion planners are commonly used, especially for complex tasks in cluttered environments. However, enforcing constraints on robot dynamics in such planners requires solving either challenging two-point boundary value problems (BVPs) or propagating robot dynamics over time, both of which are computational bottlenecks that drastically increase planning times. Meanwhile, recent efforts have shown that sampling-based motion planners can generate plans in microseconds using parallelization, but are limited to geometric paths. This paper develops AkinoPDF, a fast parallelized sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning technique for a broad class of differentially flat robot systems, including manipulators, ground and aerial vehicles, and more. Differential flatness allows us to transform the motion planning problem from the original state space to a flat output space, where an analytical time-parameterized solution of the BVP and dynamics integration can be obtained. A trajectory in the flat output space is then converted back to a closed-form dynamically feasible trajectory in the original state space, enabling fast validation via ``single instruction, multiple data" parallelism. Our method is fast, exact, and compatible with any sampling-based motion planner. We extensively verify the effectiveness of our approach in both simulated benchmarks and real experiments with cluttered and dynamic environments, requiring mere microseconds to milliseconds of planning time.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 16

SM4RT: Learning Structured Motion Geometry for 4D Reconstruction

Geometry Foundation Models (GFMs) have substantially advanced monocular 3D reconstruction, yet extending this capability to 4D dynamic understanding remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing motion perception methods (e.g., sparse tracking, dense point-wise flow) treat motion as independent point-wise displacements, ignoring the structured nature of physical motion. However, real-world objects usually obey rigid-body kinematics, and points thus usually move collectively, not in isolation. Motion itself possesses geometric structure: physical objects undergo a set of rigid-body transformations governed by SE(3), rather than unstructured point-wise displacements. Building on this insight, we propose SM4RT, a Structured Motion 4D Reconstruction Transformer for end-to-end 3D reconstruction and structured motion perception. SM4RT introduces Structure-of-Motion to represent scene dynamics, where scene motion is decomposed into a compact set of motion bases, each represented as a temporal sequence of 6D twists in SE(3). Dense scene motion is then recovered by sparse, time-shared per-pixel assignment weights over these bases, ensuring points on the same object share a common rigid-body motion trajectory. SM4RT introduces a parallel motion geometry encoder and decoder that jointly infer 3D geometry, world-coordinate motion, and scene kinematic structure in a single forward pass from monocular RGB video. SM4RT achieves strong motion reconstruction performance while preserving the geometric structure of scene motion.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 23

GimbalDiffusion: Gravity-Aware Camera Control for Video Generation

Recent progress in text-to-video generation has achieved remarkable realism, yet fine-grained control over camera motion and orientation remains elusive. Existing approaches typically encode camera trajectories through relative or ambiguous representations, limiting explicit geometric control. We introduce GimbalDiffusion, a framework that enables camera control grounded in physical-world coordinates, using gravity as a global reference. Instead of describing motion relative to previous frames, our method defines camera trajectories in an absolute coordinate system, allowing precise and interpretable control over camera parameters without requiring an initial reference frame. We leverage panoramic 360-degree videos to construct a wide variety of camera trajectories, well beyond the predominantly straight, forward-facing trajectories seen in conventional video data. To further enhance camera guidance, we introduce null-pitch conditioning, an annotation strategy that reduces the model's reliance on text content when conflicting with camera specifications (e.g., generating grass while the camera points towards the sky). Finally, we establish a benchmark for camera-aware video generation by rebalancing SpatialVID-HQ for comprehensive evaluation under wide camera pitch variation. Together, these contributions advance the controllability and robustness of text-to-video models, enabling precise, gravity-aligned camera manipulation within generative frameworks.

adobe Adobe
·
Dec 9, 2025 3

DynaVid: Learning to Generate Highly Dynamic Videos using Synthetic Motion Data

Despite recent progress, video diffusion models still struggle to synthesize realistic videos involving highly dynamic motions or requiring fine-grained motion controllability. A central limitation lies in the scarcity of such examples in commonly used training datasets. To address this, we introduce DynaVid, a video synthesis framework that leverages synthetic motion data in training, which is represented as optical flow and rendered using computer graphics pipelines. This approach offers two key advantages. First, synthetic motion offers diverse motion patterns and precise control signals that are difficult to obtain from real data. Second, unlike rendered videos with artificial appearances, rendered optical flow encodes only motion and is decoupled from appearance, thereby preventing models from reproducing the unnatural look of synthetic videos. Building on this idea, DynaVid adopts a two-stage generation framework: a motion generator first synthesizes motion, and then a motion-guided video generator produces video frames conditioned on that motion. This decoupled formulation enables the model to learn dynamic motion patterns from synthetic data while preserving visual realism from real-world videos. We validate our framework on two challenging scenarios, vigorous human motion generation and extreme camera motion control, where existing datasets are particularly limited. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DynaVid improves the realism and controllability in dynamic motion generation and camera motion control.

Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidance

We present Wan-Move, a simple and scalable framework that brings motion control to video generative models. Existing motion-controllable methods typically suffer from coarse control granularity and limited scalability, leaving their outputs insufficient for practical use. We narrow this gap by achieving precise and high-quality motion control. Our core idea is to directly make the original condition features motion-aware for guiding video synthesis. To this end, we first represent object motions with dense point trajectories, allowing fine-grained control over the scene. We then project these trajectories into latent space and propagate the first frame's features along each trajectory, producing an aligned spatiotemporal feature map that tells how each scene element should move. This feature map serves as the updated latent condition, which is naturally integrated into the off-the-shelf image-to-video model, e.g., Wan-I2V-14B, as motion guidance without any architecture change. It removes the need for auxiliary motion encoders and makes fine-tuning base models easily scalable. Through scaled training, Wan-Move generates 5-second, 480p videos whose motion controllability rivals Kling 1.5 Pro's commercial Motion Brush, as indicated by user studies. To support comprehensive evaluation, we further design MoveBench, a rigorously curated benchmark featuring diverse content categories and hybrid-verified annotations. It is distinguished by larger data volume, longer video durations, and high-quality motion annotations. Extensive experiments on MoveBench and the public dataset consistently show Wan-Move's superior motion quality. Code, models, and benchmark data are made publicly available.

AlibabaTongyiLab TongyiLab
·
Dec 9, 2025 5

OrthoPhys: Physically Plausible Video Generation with Orthogonal-View Geometry Guidance

Recent progress in video generation has led to substantial improvements in visual fidelity, yet ensuring physically consistent motion remains a fundamental challenge. Intuitively, this limitation can be attributed to the fact that real-world object motion unfolds in three-dimensional space, while video observations provide only partial, view-dependent projections of such dynamics. To address these issues, we propose OrthoPhys, a two-stage framework that leverages orthogonal-view geometry guidance to enforce physical plausibility. Instead of directly generating unstructured 2D videos, our first stage generates synchronized, four-view orthogonal videos of the foreground dynamics. By incorporating a geometry-enhanced attention mechanism across these orthogonal views, this stage effectively enforces 3D spatial coherence and implicitly grounds the motion in physical attributes. In the second stage, these physically consistent orthogonal foregrounds serve as rigid guidance to synthesize the final complete video, seamlessly learning the interaction between foreground dynamics and the background context. To support this orthogonal-view training paradigm, we construct PhysMV, a dataset containing 40K scenes, each consisting of four orthogonal viewpoints, resulting in a total of 160K video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OrthoPhys significantly improves physical realism and spatial-temporal coherence over existing video generation methods. Project page: https://anonymous.4open.science/w/Phys4D/.

  • 7 authors
·
May 24

Controllable Exaggeration for Generative Motion Models via Training-Time Adaptation and Inference-Time Guidance

Recent motion generative models have demonstrated strong capabilities in synthesizing physically plausible character motion, but often overlook established animation principles used by professional animators to ground and design their animation work. Understanding and incorporating these principles into motion generative pipelines is essential for producing motions that serve not only physically grounded applications but also the needs of the character animation community. This enables the creation of characters that not only move in physically plausible ways but also feel alive, expressive, and engaging. To close this gap, we focus on the Exaggeration principle of animation and investigate how it can be incorporated into modern motion generative pipelines to produce more expressive character motions. To this end, we introduce a framework that operates at two stages of existing motion generative pipelines. The first stage introduces exaggeration during training, where we perform supervised fine-tuning of pre-trained text-to-motion models on our curated exaggeration dataset. The second stage operates at inference time, where we: (i) introduce a mathematical formulation of exaggeration based on dynamic movement primitives (DMPs); and (ii) leverage this formulation as an exaggeration guidance signal to guide existing diffusion and flow-matching text-to-motion generation models toward exaggerated motion without additional training. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations against three strong motion generation models, we show that our methods generate more exaggerated and expressive motions while preserving neutral reference motion intent and physical plausibility.

Time-to-Move: Training-Free Motion Controlled Video Generation via Dual-Clock Denoising

Diffusion-based video generation can create realistic videos, yet existing image- and text-based conditioning fails to offer precise motion control. Prior methods for motion-conditioned synthesis typically require model-specific fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive and restrictive. We introduce Time-to-Move (TTM), a training-free, plug-and-play framework for motion- and appearance-controlled video generation with image-to-video (I2V) diffusion models. Our key insight is to use crude reference animations obtained through user-friendly manipulations such as cut-and-drag or depth-based reprojection. Motivated by SDEdit's use of coarse layout cues for image editing, we treat the crude animations as coarse motion cues and adapt the mechanism to the video domain. We preserve appearance with image conditioning and introduce dual-clock denoising, a region-dependent strategy that enforces strong alignment in motion-specified regions while allowing flexibility elsewhere, balancing fidelity to user intent with natural dynamics. This lightweight modification of the sampling process incurs no additional training or runtime cost and is compatible with any backbone. Extensive experiments on object and camera motion benchmarks show that TTM matches or exceeds existing training-based baselines in realism and motion control. Beyond this, TTM introduces a unique capability: precise appearance control through pixel-level conditioning, exceeding the limits of text-only prompting. Visit our project page for video examples and code: https://time-to-move.github.io/.

QuaMo: Quaternion Motions for Vision-based 3D Human Kinematics Capture

Vision-based 3D human motion capture from videos remains a challenge in computer vision. Traditional 3D pose estimation approaches often ignore the temporal consistency between frames, causing implausible and jittery motion. The emerging field of kinematics-based 3D motion capture addresses these issues by estimating the temporal transitioning between poses instead. A major drawback in current kinematics approaches is their reliance on Euler angles. Despite their simplicity, Euler angles suffer from discontinuity that leads to unstable motion reconstructions, especially in online settings where trajectory refinement is unavailable. Contrarily, quaternions have no discontinuity and can produce continuous transitions between poses. In this paper, we propose QuaMo, a novel Quaternion Motions method using quaternion differential equations (QDE) for human kinematics capture. We utilize the state-space model, an effective system for describing real-time kinematics estimations, with quaternion state and the QDE describing quaternion velocity. The corresponding angular acceleration is computed from a meta-PD controller with a novel acceleration enhancement that adaptively regulates the control signals as the human quickly changes to a new pose. Unlike previous work, our QDE is solved under the quaternion unit-sphere constraint that results in more accurate estimations. Experimental results show that our novel formulation of the QDE with acceleration enhancement accurately estimates 3D human kinematics with no discontinuity and minimal implausibilities. QuaMo outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets, namely Human3.6M, Fit3D, SportsPose and AIST. The code is available at https://github.com/cuongle1206/QuaMo

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 27

Trace Anything: Representing Any Video in 4D via Trajectory Fields

Effective spatio-temporal representation is fundamental to modeling, understanding, and predicting dynamics in videos. The atomic unit of a video, the pixel, traces a continuous 3D trajectory over time, serving as the primitive element of dynamics. Based on this principle, we propose representing any video as a Trajectory Field: a dense mapping that assigns a continuous 3D trajectory function of time to each pixel in every frame. With this representation, we introduce Trace Anything, a neural network that predicts the entire trajectory field in a single feed-forward pass. Specifically, for each pixel in each frame, our model predicts a set of control points that parameterizes a trajectory (i.e., a B-spline), yielding its 3D position at arbitrary query time instants. We trained the Trace Anything model on large-scale 4D data, including data from our new platform, and our experiments demonstrate that: (i) Trace Anything achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark for trajectory field estimation and performs competitively on established point-tracking benchmarks; (ii) it offers significant efficiency gains thanks to its one-pass paradigm, without requiring iterative optimization or auxiliary estimators; and (iii) it exhibits emergent abilities, including goal-conditioned manipulation, motion forecasting, and spatio-temporal fusion. Project page: https://trace-anything.github.io/.

ByteDance-Seed ByteDance Seed
·
Oct 15, 2025 2

Follow-Your-Click: Open-domain Regional Image Animation via Short Prompts

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

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024 5

PSAvatar: A Point-based Morphable Shape Model for Real-Time Head Avatar Animation with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Despite much progress, achieving real-time high-fidelity head avatar animation is still difficult and existing methods have to trade-off between speed and quality. 3DMM based methods often fail to model non-facial structures such as eyeglasses and hairstyles, while neural implicit models suffer from deformation inflexibility and rendering inefficiency. Although 3D Gaussian has been demonstrated to possess promising capability for geometry representation and radiance field reconstruction, applying 3D Gaussian in head avatar creation remains a major challenge since it is difficult for 3D Gaussian to model the head shape variations caused by changing poses and expressions. In this paper, we introduce PSAvatar, a novel framework for animatable head avatar creation that utilizes discrete geometric primitive to create a parametric morphable shape model and employs 3D Gaussian for fine detail representation and high fidelity rendering. The parametric morphable shape model is a Point-based Morphable Shape Model (PMSM) which uses points instead of meshes for 3D representation to achieve enhanced representation flexibility. The PMSM first converts the FLAME mesh to points by sampling on the surfaces as well as off the meshes to enable the reconstruction of not only surface-like structures but also complex geometries such as eyeglasses and hairstyles. By aligning these points with the head shape in an analysis-by-synthesis manner, the PMSM makes it possible to utilize 3D Gaussian for fine detail representation and appearance modeling, thus enabling the creation of high-fidelity avatars. We show that PSAvatar can reconstruct high-fidelity head avatars of a variety of subjects and the avatars can be animated in real-time (ge 25 fps at a resolution of 512 times 512 ).

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23, 2024

Improving Robotic Imitation Learning via Trajectory Standardization

Imitation learning for robotic manipulation relies on large sets of human demonstration trajectories, which are often noisy and temporally irregular due to variable operator speed, intermittent pauses, and inconsistent action density. A common preprocessing strategy is time-uniform downsampling to shorten sequences, but it cannot effectively remove speed-induced non-uniformity or redundant pauses. This mismatch degrades data quality and hinders policy learning. To address this issue, we propose Information-Standardized Trajectory Resampling (ISR), an offline preprocessing method for effective imitation learning. ISR resamples each trajectory by enforcing approximately equal information distance between adjacent points. Specifically, we map trajectories onto an information-modulated Riemannian manifold and perform geodesic-equidistant parameterization. We construct an information-intensity field from velocity and acceleration norms: the velocity term removes small-motion redundancy, while the acceleration term preserves high-curvature and fine-manipulation phases. We evaluate ISR on three real-world manipulation tasks with mainstream imitation learning policies. Compared with the baseline time-uniform 3x downsampling, ISR improves task success rates by about 25%, remains robust across datasets collected from different operators, and reduces both dataset size and training cost. The code and videos are publicly available at https://d-robotics-ai-lab.github.io/isr.page.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 21

ForceTwin: Physics-informed Digital Twins for Robotic Manipulation from Instrumented Human Interaction

Manipulating objects requires understanding not only their motion, but also the physical properties that determine it. For articulated objects, these include inertia, friction, and mechanisms such as springs or door closers, whose effects can vary with configuration and velocity. Such properties are not directly observable from appearance: visually identical doors may require very different effort to manipulate. Existing digital-twin pipelines recover primarily kinematics or assign static physical parameters from visual and language priors, which can yield physically implausible estimates. As a result, state-dependent mechanism dynamics remain unidentified and are not represented in standard asset formats. We present ForceTwin, a system for identifying physics-informed digital twins of articulated objects from instrumented human interaction. A person probes an object using a handheld force-sensing gripper, providing synchronized poses and interaction forces from which we estimate the articulation, parametric dynamics including inertia, Coulomb friction, viscous damping, and a structured neural residual capturing state-dependent mechanism forces. ForceTwin nearly halves the inertial-parameter error of a VLM prior. As a feedforward dynamics model for impedance control on a Spot and a Franka FR3, ForceTwin achieves 87% goal completion across nine object-embodiment pairs, compared with 60% using VLM-prior and 57% using kinematics-only twins, with the largest gains on objects whose strong mechanisms cause both baselines to stall. We further use the identified twins to train whole-body door-traversal policies and deploy them in the real world. Project Page: https://timengelbracht.github.io/forcetwin-website/

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 17

BioMoDiffuse: Physics-Guided Biomechanical Diffusion for Controllable and Authentic Human Motion Synthesis

Human motion generation holds significant promise in fields such as animation, film production, and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to produce physically plausible movements that adhere to biomechanical principles. While recent autoregressive and diffusion models have improved visual quality, they frequently overlook essential biodynamic features, such as muscle activation patterns and joint coordination, leading to motions that either violate physical laws or lack controllability. This paper introduces BioMoDiffuse, a novel biomechanics-aware diffusion framework that addresses these limitations. It features three key innovations: (1) A lightweight biodynamic network that integrates muscle electromyography (EMG) signals and kinematic features with acceleration constraints, (2) A physics-guided diffusion process that incorporates real-time biomechanical verification via modified Euler-Lagrange equations, and (3) A decoupled control mechanism that allows independent regulation of motion speed and semantic context. We also propose a set of comprehensive evaluation protocols that combines traditional metrics (FID, R-precision, etc.) with new biomechanical criteria (smoothness, foot sliding, floating, etc.). Our approach bridges the gap between data-driven motion synthesis and biomechanical authenticity, establishing new benchmarks for physically accurate motion generation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 8, 2025

Structure From Tracking: Distilling Structure-Preserving Motion for Video Generation

Reality is a dance between rigid constraints and deformable structures. For video models, that means generating motion that preserves fidelity as well as structure. Despite progress in diffusion models, producing realistic structure-preserving motion remains challenging, especially for articulated and deformable objects such as humans and animals. Scaling training data alone, so far, has failed to resolve physically implausible transitions. Existing approaches rely on conditioning with noisy motion representations, such as optical flow or skeletons extracted using an external imperfect model. To address these challenges, we introduce an algorithm to distill structure-preserving motion priors from an autoregressive video tracking model (SAM2) into a bidirectional video diffusion model (CogVideoX). With our method, we train SAM2VideoX, which contains two innovations: (1) a bidirectional feature fusion module that extracts global structure-preserving motion priors from a recurrent model like SAM2; (2) a Local Gram Flow loss that aligns how local features move together. Experiments on VBench and in human studies show that SAM2VideoX delivers consistent gains (+2.60\% on VBench, 21-22\% lower FVD, and 71.4\% human preference) over prior baselines. Specifically, on VBench, we achieve 95.51\%, surpassing REPA (92.91\%) by 2.60\%, and reduce FVD to 360.57, a 21.20\% and 22.46\% improvement over REPA- and LoRA-finetuning, respectively. The project website can be found at https://sam2videox.github.io/ .

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 12, 2025 2

Seeing the Unseen: Unified Visible--Invisible Motion for Physically Consistent Video Generation

Recent advances in video generation have achieved impressive visual quality, yet they often fail to produce physically consistent dynamics due to the lack of explicit modeling of underlying physical processes. Existing approaches either rely on simulators with strong assumptions or use coarse semantic guidance, and further struggle to effectively inject physical priors into generation models. In this work, we propose Seeing the Unseen, a unified framework for physics-grounded video generation. Our approach decomposes the problem into two stages: learning physical dynamics and injecting them into video synthesis. First, we introduce a lightweight Particle-based Graph Dynamics Simulator (PGDS) that learns generalizable physical interactions from data and predicts plausible 3D motion trajectories. Second, we propose a Visible--Invisible Motion Field (VIMF) that captures both motion observable in the input frame and motion that emerges over time due to object dynamics. This representation enables more complete and structured motion guidance compared to conventional physical signals. By integrating these trajectories into a diffusion-based generator, our method produces videos that are both visually coherent and physically consistent. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved motion accuracy, interaction consistency, and reduced physical artifacts compared to strong baselines.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 30

MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation

Motions in a video primarily consist of camera motion, induced by camera movement, and object motion, resulting from object movement. Accurate control of both camera and object motion is essential for video generation. However, existing works either mainly focus on one type of motion or do not clearly distinguish between the two, limiting their control capabilities and diversity. Therefore, this paper presents MotionCtrl, a unified and flexible motion controller for video generation designed to effectively and independently control camera and object motion. The architecture and training strategy of MotionCtrl are carefully devised, taking into account the inherent properties of camera motion, object motion, and imperfect training data. Compared to previous methods, MotionCtrl offers three main advantages: 1) It effectively and independently controls camera motion and object motion, enabling more fine-grained motion control and facilitating flexible and diverse combinations of both types of motion. 2) Its motion conditions are determined by camera poses and trajectories, which are appearance-free and minimally impact the appearance or shape of objects in generated videos. 3) It is a relatively generalizable model that can adapt to a wide array of camera poses and trajectories once trained. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of MotionCtrl over existing methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023 2

Infinite-Homography as Robust Conditioning for Camera-Controlled Video Generation

Recent progress in video diffusion models has spurred growing interest in camera-controlled novel-view video generation for dynamic scenes, aiming to provide creators with cinematic camera control capabilities in post-production. A key challenge in camera-controlled video generation is ensuring fidelity to the specified camera pose, while maintaining view consistency and reasoning about occluded geometry from limited observations. To address this, existing methods either train trajectory-conditioned video generation model on trajectory-video pair dataset, or estimate depth from the input video to reproject it along a target trajectory and generate the unprojected regions. Nevertheless, existing methods struggle to generate camera-pose-faithful, high-quality videos for two main reasons: (1) reprojection-based approaches are highly susceptible to errors caused by inaccurate depth estimation; and (2) the limited diversity of camera trajectories in existing datasets restricts learned models. To address these limitations, we present InfCam, a depth-free, camera-controlled video-to-video generation framework with high pose fidelity. The framework integrates two key components: (1) infinite homography warping, which encodes 3D camera rotations directly within the 2D latent space of a video diffusion model. Conditioning on this noise-free rotational information, the residual parallax term is predicted through end-to-end training to achieve high camera-pose fidelity; and (2) a data augmentation pipeline that transforms existing synthetic multiview datasets into sequences with diverse trajectories and focal lengths. Experimental results demonstrate that InfCam outperforms baseline methods in camera-pose accuracy and visual fidelity, generalizing well from synthetic to real-world data. Link to our project page:https://emjay73.github.io/InfCam/

kaist-ai KAIST AI
·
Dec 18, 2025 5

ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactions

To enable machines to learn how humans interact with the physical world in our daily activities, it is crucial to provide rich data that encompasses the 3D motion of humans as well as the motion of objects in a learnable 3D representation. Ideally, this data should be collected in a natural setup, capturing the authentic dynamic 3D signals during human-object interactions. To address this challenge, we introduce the ParaHome system, designed to capture and parameterize dynamic 3D movements of humans and objects within a common home environment. Our system consists of a multi-view setup with 70 synchronized RGB cameras, as well as wearable motion capture devices equipped with an IMU-based body suit and hand motion capture gloves. By leveraging the ParaHome system, we collect a novel large-scale dataset of human-object interaction. Notably, our dataset offers key advancement over existing datasets in three main aspects: (1) capturing 3D body and dexterous hand manipulation motion alongside 3D object movement within a contextual home environment during natural activities; (2) encompassing human interaction with multiple objects in various episodic scenarios with corresponding descriptions in texts; (3) including articulated objects with multiple parts expressed with parameterized articulations. Building upon our dataset, we introduce new research tasks aimed at building a generative model for learning and synthesizing human-object interactions in a real-world room setting.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 18, 2024

MechVerse: Evaluating Physical Motion Consistency in Video Generation Models

Text- and image-conditioned video generation models have achieved strong visual fidelity and temporal coherence, but they often fail to generate motion governed by kinematic and geometric constraints. In these settings, object parts must remain rigid, maintain contact or coupling with neighboring components, and transfer motion consistently across connected parts. These requirements are especially explicit in articulated mechanical assemblies, where motion is constrained by rigid-link geometry, contact/coupling relations, and transmission through kinematic chains. A generated video may therefore appear plausible while violating the intended mechanism, such as rotating a part that should translate, deforming a rigid component, breaking coupling between parts, or failing to move downstream components. To evaluate this gap, We introduce MechVerse, a benchmark for mechanically consistent image-to-video generation. MechVerse contains 21,156 synthetic clips from 1,357 mechanical assemblies across 141 categories, organized into three tiers of increasing kinematic complexity: independent articulation, pairwise coupling, and densely coupled multi-part mechanisms. Each clip is paired with a structured prompt describing part identities, stationary supports, moving components, motion primitives, direction, speed/extent, and inter-part dependencies. We evaluate proprietary, open-source, and fine-tuned image-to-video models using standard video metrics, instruction-following scores, and human judgments of motion correctness and kinematic coupling. Results show that current models can preserve appearance and smoothness while failing to generate mechanically admissible motion, with errors increasing as coupling complexity grows. MechVerse provides a benchmark for measuring and improving mechanism-aware video generation from image and language inputs.

  • 4 authors
·
May 13

SCENIC: Scene-aware Semantic Navigation with Instruction-guided Control

Synthesizing natural human motion that adapts to complex environments while allowing creative control remains a fundamental challenge in motion synthesis. Existing models often fall short, either by assuming flat terrain or lacking the ability to control motion semantics through text. To address these limitations, we introduce SCENIC, a diffusion model designed to generate human motion that adapts to dynamic terrains within virtual scenes while enabling semantic control through natural language. The key technical challenge lies in simultaneously reasoning about complex scene geometry while maintaining text control. This requires understanding both high-level navigation goals and fine-grained environmental constraints. The model must ensure physical plausibility and precise navigation across varied terrain, while also preserving user-specified text control, such as ``carefully stepping over obstacles" or ``walking upstairs like a zombie." Our solution introduces a hierarchical scene reasoning approach. At its core is a novel scene-dependent, goal-centric canonicalization that handles high-level goal constraint, and is complemented by an ego-centric distance field that captures local geometric details. This dual representation enables our model to generate physically plausible motion across diverse 3D scenes. By implementing frame-wise text alignment, our system achieves seamless transitions between different motion styles while maintaining scene constraints. Experiments demonstrate our novel diffusion model generates arbitrarily long human motions that both adapt to complex scenes with varying terrain surfaces and respond to textual prompts. Additionally, we show SCENIC can generalize to four real-scene datasets. Our code, dataset, and models will be released at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/scenic/.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 20, 2024

4DStreamCtrl: Interactive Video Generation with Online 4D Control

Generative video models now synthesize footage nearly indistinguishable from reality. Their promise as interactive tools hinges on fine-grained control of how objects and the camera move over time, yet each existing approach captures only part of this: camera-parameter methods steer the viewpoint but cannot move objects, 2D-trajectory methods act in the image plane and ignore depth and occlusion, and recent 3D methods add geometry but run only offline at a fixed length. In particular, none combines 3D-consistent control of both camera and objects with real-time, streaming generation. Here we show that camera motion, object trajectories, and depth can be unified into a single 3D point-track representation, from which one model performs joint camera and object control, depth editing, and motion transfer in a single forward pass. To learn this interface at scale, we mine in-the-wild video for 3D motion supervision, yielding OpenVidHD-Motion3D, and encode it with a lightweight Geometric Motion Head that plugs into a pretrained video diffusion model. Because this encoder is temporally separable, we distill the model into a causal streaming student that generates arbitrarily long video in four denoising steps at memory independent of length. This unified design surpasses prior camera-only, 2D, and offline-3D methods in motion-control precision while covering modalities they address only in isolation. 4DStreamCtrl runs at 20 FPS on a single high-end GPU for 480p video and stays temporally coherent over hundreds of frames, enabling, to our knowledge, interactive 4D-controllable streaming generation for the first time. More broadly, grounding generation in explicit 3D geometry with efficient causal inference points toward interactive world models with closed-loop spatiotemporal control, from controllable simulators to real-time visual imagination for embodied agents.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 26

Programmable Motion Generation for Open-Set Motion Control Tasks

Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints, such as trajectories, key-frames, interactions, etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. They are often specialized, and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control, we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this, we introduce a new paradigm, programmable motion generation. In this paradigm, any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently, the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the required constraints. Experiments show that we can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics, geometric constraints, physical laws, interactions with scenes, objects or the character own body parts, etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach, without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks, we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models, we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.

  • 5 authors
·
May 29, 2024

HyperMotion: DiT-Based Pose-Guided Human Image Animation of Complex Motions

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

  • 8 authors
·
May 28, 2025

Motion Forcing: A Decoupled Framework for Robust Video Generation in Motion Dynamics

The ultimate goal of video generation is to satisfy a fundamental trilemma: achieving high visual quality, maintaining rigorous physical consistency, and enabling precise controllability. While recent models can maintain this balance in simple, isolated scenarios, we observe that this equilibrium is fragile and often breaks down as scene complexity increases (e.g., involving collisions or dense traffic). To address this, we introduce Motion Forcing, a framework designed to stabilize this trilemma even in complex generative tasks. Our key insight is to explicitly decouple physical reasoning from visual synthesis via a hierarchical ``Point-Shape-Appearance'' paradigm. This approach decomposes generation into verifiable stages: modeling complex dynamics as sparse geometric anchors (Point), expanding them into dynamic depth maps that explicitly resolve 3D geometry (Shape), and finally rendering high-fidelity textures (Appearance). Furthermore, to foster robust physical understanding, we employ a Masked Point Recovery strategy. By randomly masking input anchors during training and enforcing the reconstruction of complete dynamic depth, the model is compelled to move beyond passive pattern matching and learn latent physical laws (e.g., inertia) to infer missing trajectories. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving benchmarks show that Motion Forcing significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, maintaining trilemma stability across complex scenes. Evaluations on physics and robotics further confirm our framework's generality.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 11