Daily Papers

Pose-controllable character video generation is in high demand with extensive applications for fields such as automatic advertising and content creation on social media platforms. While existing character image animation methods using pose sequences and reference images have shown promising performance, they tend to struggle with incoherent animation in complex scenarios, such as multiple character animation and body occlusion. Additionally, current methods request large-scale high-quality videos with stable backgrounds and temporal consistency as training datasets, otherwise, their performance will greatly deteriorate. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of character image animation tools. In this paper, we propose a practical and robust framework Follow-Your-Pose v2, which can be trained on noisy open-sourced videos readily available on the internet. Multi-condition guiders are designed to address the challenges of background stability, body occlusion in multi-character generation, and consistency of character appearance. Moreover, to fill the gap of fair evaluation of multi-character pose animation, we propose a new benchmark comprising approximately 4,000 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a margin of over 35\% across 2 datasets and on 7 metrics. Meanwhile, qualitative assessments reveal a significant improvement in the quality of generated video, particularly in scenarios involving complex backgrounds and body occlusion of multi-character, suggesting the superiority of our approach.

Text-to-video models have made significant strides in generating short video clips from textual descriptions. Yet, a significant challenge remains: generating several video shots of the same characters, preserving their identity without hurting video quality, dynamics, and responsiveness to text prompts. We present Video Storyboarding, a training-free method to enable pretrained text-to-video models to generate multiple shots with consistent characters, by sharing features between them. Our key insight is that self-attention query features (Q) encode both motion and identity. This creates a hard-to-avoid trade-off between preserving character identity and making videos dynamic, when features are shared. To address this issue, we introduce a novel query injection strategy that balances identity preservation and natural motion retention. This approach improves upon naive consistency techniques applied to videos, which often struggle to maintain this delicate equilibrium. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in character consistency across scenes while maintaining high-quality motion and text alignment. These results offer insights into critical stages of video generation and the interplay of structure and motion in video diffusion models.

Generating text-editable and pose-controllable character videos have an imperious demand in creating various digital human. Nevertheless, this task has been restricted by the absence of a comprehensive dataset featuring paired video-pose captions and the generative prior models for videos. In this work, we design a novel two-stage training scheme that can utilize easily obtained datasets (i.e.,image pose pair and pose-free video) and the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) model to obtain the pose-controllable character videos. Specifically, in the first stage, only the keypoint-image pairs are used only for a controllable text-to-image generation. We learn a zero-initialized convolutional encoder to encode the pose information. In the second stage, we finetune the motion of the above network via a pose-free video dataset by adding the learnable temporal self-attention and reformed cross-frame self-attention blocks. Powered by our new designs, our method successfully generates continuously pose-controllable character videos while keeps the editing and concept composition ability of the pre-trained T2I model. The code and models will be made publicly available.

Current video generation models excel at generating short clips but still struggle with creating multi-shot, movie-like videos. Existing models trained on large-scale data on the back of rich computational resources are unsurprisingly inadequate for maintaining a logical storyline and visual consistency across multiple shots of a cohesive script since they are often trained with a single-shot objective. To this end, we propose VideoGen-of-Thought (VGoT), a collaborative and training-free architecture designed specifically for multi-shot video generation. VGoT is designed with three goals in mind as follows. Multi-Shot Video Generation: We divide the video generation process into a structured, modular sequence, including (1) Script Generation, which translates a curt story into detailed prompts for each shot; (2) Keyframe Generation, responsible for creating visually consistent keyframes faithful to character portrayals; and (3) Shot-Level Video Generation, which transforms information from scripts and keyframes into shots; (4) Smoothing Mechanism that ensures a consistent multi-shot output. Reasonable Narrative Design: Inspired by cinematic scriptwriting, our prompt generation approach spans five key domains, ensuring logical consistency, character development, and narrative flow across the entire video. Cross-Shot Consistency: We ensure temporal and identity consistency by leveraging identity-preserving (IP) embeddings across shots, which are automatically created from the narrative. Additionally, we incorporate a cross-shot smoothing mechanism, which integrates a reset boundary that effectively combines latent features from adjacent shots, resulting in smooth transitions and maintaining visual coherence throughout the video. Our experiments demonstrate that VGoT surpasses existing video generation methods in producing high-quality, coherent, multi-shot videos.

Storytelling video generation (SVG) has recently emerged as a task to create long, multi-motion, multi-scene videos that consistently represent the story described in the input text script. SVG holds great potential for diverse content creation in media and entertainment; however, it also presents significant challenges: (1) objects must exhibit a range of fine-grained, complex motions, (2) multiple objects need to appear consistently across scenes, and (3) subjects may require multiple motions with seamless transitions within a single scene. To address these challenges, we propose DreamRunner, a novel story-to-video generation method: First, we structure the input script using a large language model (LLM) to facilitate both coarse-grained scene planning as well as fine-grained object-level layout and motion planning. Next, DreamRunner presents retrieval-augmented test-time adaptation to capture target motion priors for objects in each scene, supporting diverse motion customization based on retrieved videos, thus facilitating the generation of new videos with complex, scripted motions. Lastly, we propose a novel spatial-temporal region-based 3D attention and prior injection module SR3AI for fine-grained object-motion binding and frame-by-frame semantic control. We compare DreamRunner with various SVG baselines, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in character consistency, text alignment, and smooth transitions. Additionally, DreamRunner exhibits strong fine-grained condition-following ability in compositional text-to-video generation, significantly outperforming baselines on T2V-ComBench. Finally, we validate DreamRunner's robust ability to generate multi-object interactions with qualitative examples.

Character animation is a transformative field in computer graphics and vision, enabling dynamic and realistic video animations from static images. Despite advancements, maintaining appearance consistency in animations remains a challenge. Our approach addresses this by introducing a training-free framework that ensures the generated video sequence preserves the reference image's subtleties, such as physique and proportions, through a dual alignment strategy. We decouple skeletal and motion priors from pose information, enabling precise control over animation generation. Our method also improves pixel-level alignment for conditional control from the reference character, enhancing the temporal consistency and visual cohesion of animations. Our method significantly enhances the quality of video generation without the need for large datasets or expensive computational resources.

Recent advancements in personalized Text-to-Video (T2V) generation highlight the importance of integrating character-specific identities and actions. However, previous T2V models struggle with identity consistency and controllable motion dynamics, mainly due to limited fine-grained facial and action-based textual prompts, and datasets that overlook key human attributes and actions. To address these challenges, we propose MotionCharacter, an efficient and high-fidelity human video generation framework designed for identity preservation and fine-grained motion control. We introduce an ID-preserving module to maintain identity fidelity while allowing flexible attribute modifications, and further integrate ID-consistency and region-aware loss mechanisms, significantly enhancing identity consistency and detail fidelity. Additionally, our approach incorporates a motion control module that prioritizes action-related text while maintaining subject consistency, along with a dataset, Human-Motion, which utilizes large language models to generate detailed motion descriptions. For simplify user control during inference, we parameterize motion intensity through a single coefficient, allowing for easy adjustments. Extensive experiments highlight the effectiveness of MotionCharacter, demonstrating significant improvements in ID-preserving, high-quality video generation.

We introduce GameGen-X, the first diffusion transformer model specifically designed for both generating and interactively controlling open-world game videos. This model facilitates high-quality, open-domain generation by simulating an extensive array of game engine features, such as innovative characters, dynamic environments, complex actions, and diverse events. Additionally, it provides interactive controllability, predicting and altering future content based on the current clip, thus allowing for gameplay simulation. To realize this vision, we first collected and built an Open-World Video Game Dataset from scratch. It is the first and largest dataset for open-world game video generation and control, which comprises over a million diverse gameplay video clips sampling from over 150 games with informative captions from GPT-4o. GameGen-X undergoes a two-stage training process, consisting of foundation model pre-training and instruction tuning. Firstly, the model was pre-trained via text-to-video generation and video continuation, endowing it with the capability for long-sequence, high-quality open-domain game video generation. Further, to achieve interactive controllability, we designed InstructNet to incorporate game-related multi-modal control signal experts. This allows the model to adjust latent representations based on user inputs, unifying character interaction and scene content control for the first time in video generation. During instruction tuning, only the InstructNet is updated while the pre-trained foundation model is frozen, enabling the integration of interactive controllability without loss of diversity and quality of generated video content.

Generating videos for visual storytelling can be a tedious and complex process that typically requires either live-action filming or graphics animation rendering. To bypass these challenges, our key idea is to utilize the abundance of existing video clips and synthesize a coherent storytelling video by customizing their appearances. We achieve this by developing a framework comprised of two functional modules: (i) Motion Structure Retrieval, which provides video candidates with desired scene or motion context described by query texts, and (ii) Structure-Guided Text-to-Video Synthesis, which generates plot-aligned videos under the guidance of motion structure and text prompts. For the first module, we leverage an off-the-shelf video retrieval system and extract video depths as motion structure. For the second module, we propose a controllable video generation model that offers flexible controls over structure and characters. The videos are synthesized by following the structural guidance and appearance instruction. To ensure visual consistency across clips, we propose an effective concept personalization approach, which allows the specification of the desired character identities through text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits significant advantages over various existing baselines.

Animation has gained significant interest in the recent film and TV industry. Despite the success of advanced video generation models like Sora, Kling, and CogVideoX in generating natural videos, they lack the same effectiveness in handling animation videos. Evaluating animation video generation is also a great challenge due to its unique artist styles, violating the laws of physics and exaggerated motions. In this paper, we present a comprehensive system, AniSora, designed for animation video generation, which includes a data processing pipeline, a controllable generation model, and an evaluation dataset. Supported by the data processing pipeline with over 10M high-quality data, the generation model incorporates a spatiotemporal mask module to facilitate key animation production functions such as image-to-video generation, frame interpolation, and localized image-guided animation. We also collect an evaluation benchmark of 948 various animation videos, the evaluation on VBench and human double-blind test demonstrates consistency in character and motion, achieving state-of-the-art results in animation video generation. Our evaluation benchmark will be publicly available at https://github.com/bilibili/Index-anisora.

Traditional animation generation methods depend on training generative models with human-labelled data, entailing a sophisticated multi-stage pipeline that demands substantial human effort and incurs high training costs. Due to limited prompting plans, these methods typically produce brief, information-poor, and context-incoherent animations. To overcome these limitations and automate the animation process, we pioneer the introduction of large multimodal models (LMMs) as the core processor to build an autonomous animation-making agent, named Anim-Director. This agent mainly harnesses the advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities of LMMs and generative AI tools to create animated videos from concise narratives or simple instructions. Specifically, it operates in three main stages: Firstly, the Anim-Director generates a coherent storyline from user inputs, followed by a detailed director's script that encompasses settings of character profiles and interior/exterior descriptions, and context-coherent scene descriptions that include appearing characters, interiors or exteriors, and scene events. Secondly, we employ LMMs with the image generation tool to produce visual images of settings and scenes. These images are designed to maintain visual consistency across different scenes using a visual-language prompting method that combines scene descriptions and images of the appearing character and setting. Thirdly, scene images serve as the foundation for producing animated videos, with LMMs generating prompts to guide this process. The whole process is notably autonomous without manual intervention, as the LMMs interact seamlessly with generative tools to generate prompts, evaluate visual quality, and select the best one to optimize the final output.

Recent studies show that image and video generation models can be prompted to reproduce copyrighted content from their training data, raising serious legal concerns around copyright infringement. Copyrighted characters, in particular, pose a difficult challenge for image generation services, with at least one lawsuit already awarding damages based on the generation of these characters. Yet, little research has empirically examined this issue. We conduct a systematic evaluation to fill this gap. First, we build CopyCat, an evaluation suite consisting of diverse copyrighted characters and a novel evaluation pipeline. Our evaluation considers both the detection of similarity to copyrighted characters and generated image's consistency with user input. Our evaluation systematically shows that both image and video generation models can still generate characters even if characters' names are not explicitly mentioned in the prompt, sometimes with only two generic keywords (e.g., prompting with "videogame, plumber" consistently generates Nintendo's Mario character). We then introduce techniques to semi-automatically identify such keywords or descriptions that trigger character generation. Using our evaluation suite, we study runtime mitigation strategies, including both existing methods and new strategies we propose. Our findings reveal that commonly employed strategies, such as prompt rewriting in the DALL-E system, are not sufficient as standalone guardrails. These strategies must be coupled with other approaches, like negative prompting, to effectively reduce the unintended generation of copyrighted characters. Our work provides empirical grounding to the discussion of copyright mitigation strategies and offers actionable insights for model deployers actively implementing them.

Image-to-video(I2V) generation aims to create a video sequence from a single image, which requires high temporal coherence and visual fidelity with the source image.However, existing approaches suffer from character appearance inconsistency and poor preservation of fine details. Moreover, they require a large amount of video data for training, which can be computationally demanding.To address these limitations,we propose PoseAnimate, a novel zero-shot I2V framework for character animation.PoseAnimate contains three key components: 1) Pose-Aware Control Module (PACM) incorporates diverse pose signals into conditional embeddings, to preserve character-independent content and maintain precise alignment of actions.2) Dual Consistency Attention Module (DCAM) enhances temporal consistency, and retains character identity and intricate background details.3) Mask-Guided Decoupling Module (MGDM) refines distinct feature perception, improving animation fidelity by decoupling the character and background.We also propose a Pose Alignment Transition Algorithm (PATA) to ensure smooth action transition.Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art training-based methods in terms of character consistency and detail fidelity. Moreover, it maintains a high level of temporal coherence throughout the generated animations.

We introduce a language generation task grounded in a popular video game environment. KNUDGE (KNowledge Constrained User-NPC Dialogue GEneration) requires models to produce trees of dialogue between video game characters that accurately reflect quest and entity specifications stated in natural language. KNUDGE is constructed from side quest dialogues drawn directly from game data of Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds, leading to real-world complexities in generation: (1) dialogues are branching trees as opposed to linear chains of utterances; (2) utterances must remain faithful to the game lore -- character personas, backstories, and entity relationships; and (3) a dialogue must accurately reveal new quest details to the human player. We report results for a set of neural generation models using supervised and in-context learning techniques; we find competent performance but room for future work addressing the challenges of creating realistic, game-quality dialogues.

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

Recent advancements in video generation have primarily leveraged diffusion models for short-duration content. However, these approaches often fall short in modeling complex narratives and maintaining character consistency over extended periods, which is essential for long-form video production like movies. We propose MovieDreamer, a novel hierarchical framework that integrates the strengths of autoregressive models with diffusion-based rendering to pioneer long-duration video generation with intricate plot progressions and high visual fidelity. Our approach utilizes autoregressive models for global narrative coherence, predicting sequences of visual tokens that are subsequently transformed into high-quality video frames through diffusion rendering. This method is akin to traditional movie production processes, where complex stories are factorized down into manageable scene capturing. Further, we employ a multimodal script that enriches scene descriptions with detailed character information and visual style, enhancing continuity and character identity across scenes. We present extensive experiments across various movie genres, demonstrating that our approach not only achieves superior visual and narrative quality but also effectively extends the duration of generated content significantly beyond current capabilities. Homepage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/MovieDreamer/.

Controllable character animation is an emerging task that generates character videos controlled by pose sequences from given character images. Although character consistency has made significant progress via reference UNet, another crucial factor, pose control, has not been well studied by existing methods yet, resulting in several issues: 1) The generation may fail when the input pose sequence is corrupted. 2) The hands generated using the DWPose sequence are blurry and unrealistic. 3) The generated video will be shaky if the pose sequence is not smooth enough. In this paper, we present RealisDance to handle all the above issues. RealisDance adaptively leverages three types of poses, avoiding failed generation caused by corrupted pose sequences. Among these pose types, HaMeR provides accurate 3D and depth information of hands, enabling RealisDance to generate realistic hands even for complex gestures. Besides using temporal attention in the main UNet, RealisDance also inserts temporal attention into the pose guidance network, smoothing the video from the pose condition aspect. Moreover, we introduce pose shuffle augmentation during training to further improve generation robustness and video smoothness. Qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of RealisDance over other existing methods, especially in hand quality.

In this paper, we first present the character texture generation system Minecraft-ify, specified to Minecraft video game toward in-game application. Ours can generate face-focused image for texture mapping tailored to 3D virtual character having cube manifold. While existing projects or works only generate texture, proposed system can inverse the user-provided real image, or generate average/random appearance from learned distribution. Moreover, it can be manipulated with text-guidance using StyleGAN and StyleCLIP. These features provide a more extended user experience with enlarged freedom as a user-friendly AI-tool. Project page can be found at https://gh-bumsookim.github.io/Minecraft-ify/

This paper presents OmniDataComposer, an innovative approach for multimodal data fusion and unlimited data generation with an intent to refine and uncomplicate interplay among diverse data modalities. Coming to the core breakthrough, it introduces a cohesive data structure proficient in processing and merging multimodal data inputs, which include video, audio, and text. Our crafted algorithm leverages advancements across multiple operations such as video/image caption extraction, dense caption extraction, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Recognize Anything Model(RAM), and object tracking. OmniDataComposer is capable of identifying over 6400 categories of objects, substantially broadening the spectrum of visual information. It amalgamates these diverse modalities, promoting reciprocal enhancement among modalities and facilitating cross-modal data correction. The final output metamorphoses each video input into an elaborate sequential document, virtually transmuting videos into thorough narratives, making them easier to be processed by large language models. Future prospects include optimizing datasets for each modality to encourage unlimited data generation. This robust base will offer priceless insights to models like ChatGPT, enabling them to create higher quality datasets for video captioning and easing question-answering tasks based on video content. OmniDataComposer inaugurates a new stage in multimodal learning, imparting enormous potential for augmenting AI's understanding and generation of complex, real-world data.

Significant progress has been made in text-to-video generation through the use of powerful generative models and large-scale internet data. However, substantial challenges remain in precisely controlling individual concepts within the generated video, such as the motion and appearance of specific characters and the movement of viewpoints. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that generates each concept in 3D representation separately and then composes them with priors from Large Language Models (LLM) and 2D diffusion models. Specifically, given an input textual prompt, our scheme consists of three stages: 1) We leverage LLM as the director to first decompose the complex query into several sub-prompts that indicate individual concepts within the video~(e.g., scene, objects, motions), then we let LLM to invoke pre-trained expert models to obtain corresponding 3D representations of concepts. 2) To compose these representations, we prompt multi-modal LLM to produce coarse guidance on the scales and coordinates of trajectories for the objects. 3) To make the generated frames adhere to natural image distribution, we further leverage 2D diffusion priors and use Score Distillation Sampling to refine the composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-fidelity videos from text with diverse motion and flexible control over each concept. Project page: https://aka.ms/c3v.

Recent advancements in character video synthesis still depend on extensive fine-tuning or complex 3D modeling processes, which can restrict accessibility and hinder real-time applicability. To address these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective tuning-free framework for character video synthesis, named MovieCharacter, designed to streamline the synthesis process while ensuring high-quality outcomes. Our framework decomposes the synthesis task into distinct, manageable modules: character segmentation and tracking, video object removal, character motion imitation, and video composition. This modular design not only facilitates flexible customization but also ensures that each component operates collaboratively to effectively meet user needs. By leveraging existing open-source models and integrating well-established techniques, MovieCharacter achieves impressive synthesis results without necessitating substantial resources or proprietary datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enhances the efficiency, accessibility, and adaptability of character video synthesis, paving the way for broader creative and interactive applications.

Character video synthesis aims to produce realistic videos of animatable characters within lifelike scenes. As a fundamental problem in the computer vision and graphics community, 3D works typically require multi-view captures for per-case training, which severely limits their applicability of modeling arbitrary characters in a short time. Recent 2D methods break this limitation via pre-trained diffusion models, but they struggle for pose generality and scene interaction. To this end, we propose MIMO, a novel framework which can not only synthesize character videos with controllable attributes (i.e., character, motion and scene) provided by simple user inputs, but also simultaneously achieve advanced scalability to arbitrary characters, generality to novel 3D motions, and applicability to interactive real-world scenes in a unified framework. The core idea is to encode the 2D video to compact spatial codes, considering the inherent 3D nature of video occurrence. Concretely, we lift the 2D frame pixels into 3D using monocular depth estimators, and decompose the video clip to three spatial components (i.e., main human, underlying scene, and floating occlusion) in hierarchical layers based on the 3D depth. These components are further encoded to canonical identity code, structured motion code and full scene code, which are utilized as control signals of synthesis process. The design of spatial decomposed modeling enables flexible user control, complex motion expression, as well as 3D-aware synthesis for scene interactions. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

In the field of digital content creation, generating high-quality 3D characters from single images is challenging, especially given the complexities of various body poses and the issues of self-occlusion and pose ambiguity. In this paper, we present CharacterGen, a framework developed to efficiently generate 3D characters. CharacterGen introduces a streamlined generation pipeline along with an image-conditioned multi-view diffusion model. This model effectively calibrates input poses to a canonical form while retaining key attributes of the input image, thereby addressing the challenges posed by diverse poses. A transformer-based, generalizable sparse-view reconstruction model is the other core component of our approach, facilitating the creation of detailed 3D models from multi-view images. We also adopt a texture-back-projection strategy to produce high-quality texture maps. Additionally, we have curated a dataset of anime characters, rendered in multiple poses and views, to train and evaluate our model. Our approach has been thoroughly evaluated through quantitative and qualitative experiments, showing its proficiency in generating 3D characters with high-quality shapes and textures, ready for downstream applications such as rigging and animation.

Existing large vision-language models (LVLMs) are largely limited to processing short, seconds-long videos and struggle with generating coherent descriptions for extended video spanning minutes or more. Long video description introduces new challenges, such as plot-level consistency across descriptions. To address these, we figure out audio-visual character identification, matching character names to each dialogue, as a key factor. We propose StoryTeller, a system for generating dense descriptions of long videos, incorporating both low-level visual concepts and high-level plot information. StoryTeller uses a multimodal large language model that integrates visual, audio, and text modalities to perform audio-visual character identification on minute-long video clips. The results are then fed into a LVLM to enhance consistency of video description. We validate our approach on movie description tasks and introduce MovieStory101, a dataset with dense descriptions for three-minute movie clips. To evaluate long video descriptions, we create MovieQA, a large set of multiple-choice questions for the MovieStory101 test set. We assess descriptions by inputting them into GPT-4 to answer these questions, using accuracy as an automatic evaluation metric. Experiments show that StoryTeller outperforms all open and closed-source baselines on MovieQA, achieving 9.5% higher accuracy than the strongest baseline, Gemini-1.5-pro, and demonstrating a +15.56% advantage in human side-by-side evaluations. Additionally, incorporating audio-visual character identification from StoryTeller improves the performance of all video description models, with Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o showing relative improvement of 5.5% and 13.0%, respectively, in accuracy on MovieQA.

Accurate Story visualization requires several necessary elements, such as identity consistency across frames, the alignment between plain text and visual content, and a reasonable layout of objects in images. Most previous works endeavor to meet these requirements by fitting a text-to-image (T2I) model on a set of videos in the same style and with the same characters, e.g., the FlintstonesSV dataset. However, the learned T2I models typically struggle to adapt to new characters, scenes, and styles, and often lack the flexibility to revise the layout of the synthesized images. This paper proposes a system for generic interactive story visualization, capable of handling multiple novel characters and supporting the editing of layout and local structure. It is developed by leveraging the prior knowledge of large language and T2I models, trained on massive corpora. The system comprises four interconnected components: story-to-prompt generation (S2P), text-to-layout generation (T2L), controllable text-to-image generation (C-T2I), and image-to-video animation (I2V). First, the S2P module converts concise story information into detailed prompts required for subsequent stages. Next, T2L generates diverse and reasonable layouts based on the prompts, offering users the ability to adjust and refine the layout to their preference. The core component, C-T2I, enables the creation of images guided by layouts, sketches, and actor-specific identifiers to maintain consistency and detail across visualizations. Finally, I2V enriches the visualization process by animating the generated images. Extensive experiments and a user study are conducted to validate the effectiveness and flexibility of interactive editing of the proposed system.

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.

We introduce an approach for augmenting text-to-video generation models with customized motions, extending their capabilities beyond the motions depicted in the original training data. By leveraging a few video samples demonstrating specific movements as input, our method learns and generalizes the input motion patterns for diverse, text-specified scenarios. Our contributions are threefold. First, to achieve our results, we finetune an existing text-to-video model to learn a novel mapping between the depicted motion in the input examples to a new unique token. To avoid overfitting to the new custom motion, we introduce an approach for regularization over videos. Second, by leveraging the motion priors in a pretrained model, our method can produce novel videos featuring multiple people doing the custom motion, and can invoke the motion in combination with other motions. Furthermore, our approach extends to the multimodal customization of motion and appearance of individualized subjects, enabling the generation of videos featuring unique characters and distinct motions. Third, to validate our method, we introduce an approach for quantitatively evaluating the learned custom motion and perform a systematic ablation study. We show that our method significantly outperforms prior appearance-based customization approaches when extended to the motion customization task.

The Agent and AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technologies have recently made significant progress. We propose AesopAgent, an Agent-driven Evolutionary System on Story-to-Video Production. AesopAgent is a practical application of agent technology for multimodal content generation. The system integrates multiple generative capabilities within a unified framework, so that individual users can leverage these modules easily. This innovative system would convert user story proposals into scripts, images, and audio, and then integrate these multimodal contents into videos. Additionally, the animating units (e.g., Gen-2 and Sora) could make the videos more infectious. The AesopAgent system could orchestrate task workflow for video generation, ensuring that the generated video is both rich in content and coherent. This system mainly contains two layers, i.e., the Horizontal Layer and the Utility Layer. In the Horizontal Layer, we introduce a novel RAG-based evolutionary system that optimizes the whole video generation workflow and the steps within the workflow. It continuously evolves and iteratively optimizes workflow by accumulating expert experience and professional knowledge, including optimizing the LLM prompts and utilities usage. The Utility Layer provides multiple utilities, leading to consistent image generation that is visually coherent in terms of composition, characters, and style. Meanwhile, it provides audio and special effects, integrating them into expressive and logically arranged videos. Overall, our AesopAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with many previous works in visual storytelling. Our AesopAgent is designed for convenient service for individual users, which is available on the following page: https://aesopai.github.io/.

Recent video generative models primarily rely on carefully written text prompts for specific tasks, like inpainting or style editing. They require labor-intensive textual descriptions for input videos, hindering their flexibility to adapt personal/raw videos to user specifications. This paper proposes RACCooN, a versatile and user-friendly video-to-paragraph-to-video generative framework that supports multiple video editing capabilities such as removal, addition, and modification, through a unified pipeline. RACCooN consists of two principal stages: Video-to-Paragraph (V2P) and Paragraph-to-Video (P2V). In the V2P stage, we automatically describe video scenes in well-structured natural language, capturing both the holistic context and focused object details. Subsequently, in the P2V stage, users can optionally refine these descriptions to guide the video diffusion model, enabling various modifications to the input video, such as removing, changing subjects, and/or adding new objects. The proposed approach stands out from other methods through several significant contributions: (1) RACCooN suggests a multi-granular spatiotemporal pooling strategy to generate well-structured video descriptions, capturing both the broad context and object details without requiring complex human annotations, simplifying precise video content editing based on text for users. (2) Our video generative model incorporates auto-generated narratives or instructions to enhance the quality and accuracy of the generated content. It supports the addition of video objects, inpainting, and attribute modification within a unified framework, surpassing existing video editing and inpainting benchmarks. The proposed framework demonstrates impressive versatile capabilities in video-to-paragraph generation, video content editing, and can be incorporated into other SoTA video generative models for further enhancement.

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

We propose a zero-shot approach for consistent Text-to-Animated-Characters synthesis based on pre-trained Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models. Existing Text-to-Video (T2V) methods are expensive to train and require large-scale video datasets to produce diverse characters and motions. At the same time, their zero-shot alternatives fail to produce temporally consistent videos. We strive to bridge this gap, and we introduce a zero-shot approach that produces temporally consistent videos of animated characters and requires no training or fine-tuning. We leverage existing text-based motion diffusion models to generate diverse motions that we utilize to guide a T2I model. To achieve temporal consistency, we introduce the Spatial Latent Alignment module that exploits cross-frame dense correspondences that we compute to align the latents of the video frames. Furthermore, we propose Pixel-Wise Guidance to steer the diffusion process in a direction that minimizes visual discrepancies. Our proposed approach generates temporally consistent videos with diverse motions and styles, outperforming existing zero-shot T2V approaches in terms of pixel-wise consistency and user preference.

We are living in a flourishing era of digital media, where everyone has the potential to become a personal filmmaker. Current research on cinematic transfer empowers filmmakers to reproduce and manipulate the visual elements (e.g., cinematography and character behaviors) from classic shots. However, characters in the reimagined films still rely on manual crafting, which involves significant technical complexity and high costs, making it unattainable for ordinary users. Furthermore, their estimated cinematography lacks smoothness due to inadequate capturing of inter-frame motion and modeling of physical trajectories. Fortunately, the remarkable success of 2D and 3D AIGC has opened up the possibility of efficiently generating characters tailored to users' needs, diversifying cinematography. In this paper, we propose DreamCinema, a novel cinematic transfer framework that pioneers generative AI into the film production paradigm, aiming at facilitating user-friendly film creation. Specifically, we first extract cinematic elements (i.e., human and camera pose) and optimize the camera trajectory. Then, we apply a character generator to efficiently create 3D high-quality characters with a human structure prior. Finally, we develop a structure-guided motion transfer strategy to incorporate generated characters into film creation and transfer it via 3D graphics engines smoothly. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for creating high-quality films with free camera and 3D characters.

We present Phenaki, a model capable of realistic video synthesis, given a sequence of textual prompts. Generating videos from text is particularly challenging due to the computational cost, limited quantities of high quality text-video data and variable length of videos. To address these issues, we introduce a new model for learning video representation which compresses the video to a small representation of discrete tokens. This tokenizer uses causal attention in time, which allows it to work with variable-length videos. To generate video tokens from text we are using a bidirectional masked transformer conditioned on pre-computed text tokens. The generated video tokens are subsequently de-tokenized to create the actual video. To address data issues, we demonstrate how joint training on a large corpus of image-text pairs as well as a smaller number of video-text examples can result in generalization beyond what is available in the video datasets. Compared to the previous video generation methods, Phenaki can generate arbitrary long videos conditioned on a sequence of prompts (i.e. time variable text or a story) in open domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a paper studies generating videos from time variable prompts. In addition, compared to the per-frame baselines, the proposed video encoder-decoder computes fewer tokens per video but results in better spatio-temporal consistency.

We present Movie Gen, a cast of foundation models that generates high-quality, 1080p HD videos with different aspect ratios and synchronized audio. We also show additional capabilities such as precise instruction-based video editing and generation of personalized videos based on a user's image. Our models set a new state-of-the-art on multiple tasks: text-to-video synthesis, video personalization, video editing, video-to-audio generation, and text-to-audio generation. Our largest video generation model is a 30B parameter transformer trained with a maximum context length of 73K video tokens, corresponding to a generated video of 16 seconds at 16 frames-per-second. We show multiple technical innovations and simplifications on the architecture, latent spaces, training objectives and recipes, data curation, evaluation protocols, parallelization techniques, and inference optimizations that allow us to reap the benefits of scaling pre-training data, model size, and training compute for training large scale media generation models. We hope this paper helps the research community to accelerate progress and innovation in media generation models. All videos from this paper are available at https://go.fb.me/MovieGenResearchVideos.

We present Emu Video, a text-to-video generation model that factorizes the generation into two steps: first generating an image conditioned on the text, and then generating a video conditioned on the text and the generated image. We identify critical design decisions--adjusted noise schedules for diffusion, and multi-stage training--that enable us to directly generate high quality and high resolution videos, without requiring a deep cascade of models as in prior work. In human evaluations, our generated videos are strongly preferred in quality compared to all prior work--81% vs. Google's Imagen Video, 90% vs. Nvidia's PYOCO, and 96% vs. Meta's Make-A-Video. Our model outperforms commercial solutions such as RunwayML's Gen2 and Pika Labs. Finally, our factorizing approach naturally lends itself to animating images based on a user's text prompt, where our generations are preferred 96% over prior work.

In this paper, we present VideoGen, a text-to-video generation approach, which can generate a high-definition video with high frame fidelity and strong temporal consistency using reference-guided latent diffusion. We leverage an off-the-shelf text-to-image generation model, e.g., Stable Diffusion, to generate an image with high content quality from the text prompt, as a reference image to guide video generation. Then, we introduce an efficient cascaded latent diffusion module conditioned on both the reference image and the text prompt, for generating latent video representations, followed by a flow-based temporal upsampling step to improve the temporal resolution. Finally, we map latent video representations into a high-definition video through an enhanced video decoder. During training, we use the first frame of a ground-truth video as the reference image for training the cascaded latent diffusion module. The main characterises of our approach include: the reference image generated by the text-to-image model improves the visual fidelity; using it as the condition makes the diffusion model focus more on learning the video dynamics; and the video decoder is trained over unlabeled video data, thus benefiting from high-quality easily-available videos. VideoGen sets a new state-of-the-art in text-to-video generation in terms of both qualitative and quantitative evaluation.

We introduce TADA, a simple-yet-effective approach that takes textual descriptions and produces expressive 3D avatars with high-quality geometry and lifelike textures, that can be animated and rendered with traditional graphics pipelines. Existing text-based character generation methods are limited in terms of geometry and texture quality, and cannot be realistically animated due to inconsistent alignment between the geometry and the texture, particularly in the face region. To overcome these limitations, TADA leverages the synergy of a 2D diffusion model and an animatable parametric body model. Specifically, we derive an optimizable high-resolution body model from SMPL-X with 3D displacements and a texture map, and use hierarchical rendering with score distillation sampling (SDS) to create high-quality, detailed, holistic 3D avatars from text. To ensure alignment between the geometry and texture, we render normals and RGB images of the generated character and exploit their latent embeddings in the SDS training process. We further introduce various expression parameters to deform the generated character during training, ensuring that the semantics of our generated character remain consistent with the original SMPL-X model, resulting in an animatable character. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that TADA significantly surpasses existing approaches on both qualitative and quantitative measures. TADA enables creation of large-scale digital character assets that are ready for animation and rendering, while also being easily editable through natural language. The code will be public for research purposes.

Text-driven content creation has evolved to be a transformative technique that revolutionizes creativity. Here we study the task of text-driven human video generation, where a video sequence is synthesized from texts describing the appearance and motions of a target performer. Compared to general text-driven video generation, human-centric video generation requires maintaining the appearance of synthesized human while performing complex motions. In this work, we present Text2Performer to generate vivid human videos with articulated motions from texts. Text2Performer has two novel designs: 1) decomposed human representation and 2) diffusion-based motion sampler. First, we decompose the VQVAE latent space into human appearance and pose representation in an unsupervised manner by utilizing the nature of human videos. In this way, the appearance is well maintained along the generated frames. Then, we propose continuous VQ-diffuser to sample a sequence of pose embeddings. Unlike existing VQ-based methods that operate in the discrete space, continuous VQ-diffuser directly outputs the continuous pose embeddings for better motion modeling. Finally, motion-aware masking strategy is designed to mask the pose embeddings spatial-temporally to enhance the temporal coherence. Moreover, to facilitate the task of text-driven human video generation, we contribute a Fashion-Text2Video dataset with manually annotated action labels and text descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Text2Performer generates high-quality human videos (up to 512x256 resolution) with diverse appearances and flexible motions.

Creating a vivid video from the event or scenario in our imagination is a truly fascinating experience. Recent advancements in text-to-video synthesis have unveiled the potential to achieve this with prompts only. While text is convenient in conveying the overall scene context, it may be insufficient to control precisely. In this paper, we explore customized video generation by utilizing text as context description and motion structure (e.g. frame-wise depth) as concrete guidance. Our method, dubbed Make-Your-Video, involves joint-conditional video generation using a Latent Diffusion Model that is pre-trained for still image synthesis and then promoted for video generation with the introduction of temporal modules. This two-stage learning scheme not only reduces the computing resources required, but also improves the performance by transferring the rich concepts available in image datasets solely into video generation. Moreover, we use a simple yet effective causal attention mask strategy to enable longer video synthesis, which mitigates the potential quality degradation effectively. Experimental results show the superiority of our method over existing baselines, particularly in terms of temporal coherence and fidelity to users' guidance. In addition, our model enables several intriguing applications that demonstrate potential for practical usage.

Text-driven video generation witnesses rapid progress. However, merely using text prompts is not enough to depict the desired subject appearance that accurately aligns with users' intents, especially for customized content creation. In this paper, we study the task of video generation with image prompts, which provide more accurate and direct content control beyond the text prompts. Specifically, we propose a feed-forward framework VideoBooth, with two dedicated designs: 1) We propose to embed image prompts in a coarse-to-fine manner. Coarse visual embeddings from image encoder provide high-level encodings of image prompts, while fine visual embeddings from the proposed attention injection module provide multi-scale and detailed encoding of image prompts. These two complementary embeddings can faithfully capture the desired appearance. 2) In the attention injection module at fine level, multi-scale image prompts are fed into different cross-frame attention layers as additional keys and values. This extra spatial information refines the details in the first frame and then it is propagated to the remaining frames, which maintains temporal consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoBooth achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating customized high-quality videos with subjects specified in image prompts. Notably, VideoBooth is a generalizable framework where a single model works for a wide range of image prompts with feed-forward pass.

We present MM-VID, an integrated system that harnesses the capabilities of GPT-4V, combined with specialized tools in vision, audio, and speech, to facilitate advanced video understanding. MM-VID is designed to address the challenges posed by long-form videos and intricate tasks such as reasoning within hour-long content and grasping storylines spanning multiple episodes. MM-VID uses a video-to-script generation with GPT-4V to transcribe multimodal elements into a long textual script. The generated script details character movements, actions, expressions, and dialogues, paving the way for large language models (LLMs) to achieve video understanding. This enables advanced capabilities, including audio description, character identification, and multimodal high-level comprehension. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MM-VID in handling distinct video genres with various video lengths. Additionally, we showcase its potential when applied to interactive environments, such as video games and graphic user interfaces.

Creating and updating pixel art character sprites with many frames spanning different animations and poses takes time and can quickly become repetitive. However, that can be partially automated to allow artists to focus on more creative tasks. In this work, we concentrate on creating pixel art character sprites in a target pose from images of them facing other three directions. We present a novel approach to character generation by framing the problem as a missing data imputation task. Our proposed generative adversarial networks model receives the images of a character in all available domains and produces the image of the missing pose. We evaluated our approach in the scenarios with one, two, and three missing images, achieving similar or better results to the state-of-the-art when more images are available. We also evaluate the impact of the proposed changes to the base architecture.

Recently, video generation has attracted massive attention and yielded noticeable outcomes. Concerning the characteristics of video, multi-text conditioning incorporating sequential events is necessary for next-step video generation. In this work, we propose a novel multi-text video generation~(MTVG) by directly utilizing a pre-trained diffusion-based text-to-video~(T2V) generation model without additional fine-tuning. To generate consecutive video segments, visual consistency generated by distinct prompts is necessary with diverse variations, such as motion and content-related transitions. Our proposed MTVG includes Dynamic Noise and Last Frame Aware Inversion which reinitialize the noise latent to preserve visual coherence between videos of different prompts and prevent repetitive motion or contents. Furthermore, we present Structure Guiding Sampling to maintain the global appearance across the frames in a single video clip, where we leverage iterative latent updates across the preceding frame. Additionally, our Prompt Generator allows for arbitrary format of text conditions consisting of diverse events. As a result, our extensive experiments, including diverse transitions of descriptions, demonstrate that our proposed methods show superior generated outputs in terms of semantically coherent and temporally seamless video.Video examples are available in our project page: https://kuai-lab.github.io/mtvg-page.

We present PEGASUS, a method for constructing a personalized generative 3D face avatar from monocular video sources. Our generative 3D avatar enables disentangled controls to selectively alter the facial attributes (e.g., hair or nose) while preserving the identity. Our approach consists of two stages: synthetic database generation and constructing a personalized generative avatar. We generate a synthetic video collection of the target identity with varying facial attributes, where the videos are synthesized by borrowing the attributes from monocular videos of diverse identities. Then, we build a person-specific generative 3D avatar that can modify its attributes continuously while preserving its identity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method of generating a synthetic database and creating a 3D generative avatar is the most effective in preserving identity while achieving high realism. Subsequently, we introduce a zero-shot approach to achieve the same goal of generative modeling more efficiently by leveraging a previously constructed personalized generative model.

Text-to-video generation aims to produce a video based on a given prompt. Recently, several commercial video models have been able to generate plausible videos with minimal noise, excellent details, and high aesthetic scores. However, these models rely on large-scale, well-filtered, high-quality videos that are not accessible to the community. Many existing research works, which train models using the low-quality WebVid-10M dataset, struggle to generate high-quality videos because the models are optimized to fit WebVid-10M. In this work, we explore the training scheme of video models extended from Stable Diffusion and investigate the feasibility of leveraging low-quality videos and synthesized high-quality images to obtain a high-quality video model. We first analyze the connection between the spatial and temporal modules of video models and the distribution shift to low-quality videos. We observe that full training of all modules results in a stronger coupling between spatial and temporal modules than only training temporal modules. Based on this stronger coupling, we shift the distribution to higher quality without motion degradation by finetuning spatial modules with high-quality images, resulting in a generic high-quality video model. Evaluations are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, particularly in picture quality, motion, and concept composition.

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

This report introduces Make-A-Character 2, an advanced system for generating high-quality 3D characters from single portrait photographs, ideal for game development and digital human applications. Make-A-Character 2 builds upon its predecessor by incorporating several significant improvements for image-based head generation. We utilize the IC-Light method to correct non-ideal illumination in input photos and apply neural network-based color correction to harmonize skin tones between the photos and game engine renders. We also employ the Hierarchical Representation Network to capture high-frequency facial structures and conduct adaptive skeleton calibration for accurate and expressive facial animations. The entire image-to-3D-character generation process takes less than 2 minutes. Furthermore, we leverage transformer architecture to generate co-speech facial and gesture actions, enabling real-time conversation with the generated character. These technologies have been integrated into our conversational AI avatar products.

Generating talking face videos from various conditions has recently become a highly popular research area within generative tasks. However, building a high-quality face video generation model requires a well-performing pre-trained backbone, a key obstacle that universal models fail to adequately address. Most existing works rely on universal video or image generation models and optimize control mechanisms, but they neglect the evident upper bound in video quality due to the limited capabilities of the backbones, which is a result of the lack of high-quality human face video datasets. In this work, we investigate the unsatisfactory results from related studies, gather and trim existing public talking face video datasets, and additionally collect and annotate a large-scale dataset, resulting in a comprehensive, high-quality multiracial face collection named FaceVid-1K. Using this dataset, we craft several effective pre-trained backbone models for face video generation. Specifically, we conduct experiments with several well-established video generation models, including text-to-video, image-to-video, and unconditional video generation, under various settings. We obtain the corresponding performance benchmarks and compared them with those trained on public datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our dataset. These experiments also allow us to investigate empirical strategies for crafting domain-specific video generation tasks with cost-effective settings. We will make our curated dataset, along with the pre-trained talking face video generation models, publicly available as a resource contribution to hopefully advance the research field.

Customized image generation, which seeks to synthesize images with consistent characters, holds significant relevance for applications such as storytelling, portrait generation, and character design. However, previous approaches have encountered challenges in preserving characters with high-fidelity consistency due to inadequate feature extraction and concept confusion of reference characters. Therefore, we propose Character-Adapter, a plug-and-play framework designed to generate images that preserve the details of reference characters, ensuring high-fidelity consistency. Character-Adapter employs prompt-guided segmentation to ensure fine-grained regional features of reference characters and dynamic region-level adapters to mitigate concept confusion. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of Character-Adapter. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that Character-Adapter achieves the state-of-the-art performance of consistent character generation, with an improvement of 24.8% compared with other methods. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Character-Adapter/Character-Adapte

Recent text-to-video generation approaches rely on computationally heavy training and require large-scale video datasets. In this paper, we introduce a new task of zero-shot text-to-video generation and propose a low-cost approach (without any training or optimization) by leveraging the power of existing text-to-image synthesis methods (e.g., Stable Diffusion), making them suitable for the video domain. Our key modifications include (i) enriching the latent codes of the generated frames with motion dynamics to keep the global scene and the background time consistent; and (ii) reprogramming frame-level self-attention using a new cross-frame attention of each frame on the first frame, to preserve the context, appearance, and identity of the foreground object. Experiments show that this leads to low overhead, yet high-quality and remarkably consistent video generation. Moreover, our approach is not limited to text-to-video synthesis but is also applicable to other tasks such as conditional and content-specialized video generation, and Video Instruct-Pix2Pix, i.e., instruction-guided video editing. As experiments show, our method performs comparably or sometimes better than recent approaches, despite not being trained on additional video data. Our code will be open sourced at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Text2Video-Zero .

Creating and animating 3D biped cartoon characters is crucial and valuable in various applications. Compared with geometry, the diverse texture design plays an important role in making 3D biped cartoon characters vivid and charming. Therefore, we focus on automatic texture design for cartoon characters based on input instructions. This is challenging for domain-specific requirements and a lack of high-quality data. To address this challenge, we propose Make-It-Vivid, the first attempt to enable high-quality texture generation from text in UV space. We prepare a detailed text-texture paired data for 3D characters by using vision-question-answering agents. Then we customize a pretrained text-to-image model to generate texture map with template structure while preserving the natural 2D image knowledge. Furthermore, to enhance fine-grained details, we propose a novel adversarial learning scheme to shorten the domain gap between original dataset and realistic texture domain. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms current texture generation methods, resulting in efficient character texturing and faithful generation with prompts. Besides, we showcase various applications such as out of domain generation and texture stylization. We also provide an efficient generation system for automatic text-guided textured character generation and animation.

Artistic video portrait generation is a significant and sought-after task in the fields of computer graphics and vision. While various methods have been developed that integrate NeRFs or StyleGANs with instructional editing models for creating and editing drivable portraits, these approaches face several challenges. They often rely heavily on large datasets, require extensive customization processes, and frequently result in reduced image quality. To address the above problems, we propose the Efficient Monotonic Video Style Avatar (Emo-Avatar) through deferred neural rendering that enhances StyleGAN's capacity for producing dynamic, drivable portrait videos. We proposed a two-stage deferred neural rendering pipeline. In the first stage, we utilize few-shot PTI initialization to initialize the StyleGAN generator through several extreme poses sampled from the video to capture the consistent representation of aligned faces from the target portrait. In the second stage, we propose a Laplacian pyramid for high-frequency texture sampling from UV maps deformed by dynamic flow of expression for motion-aware texture prior integration to provide torso features to enhance StyleGAN's ability to generate complete and upper body for portrait video rendering. Emo-Avatar reduces style customization time from hours to merely 5 minutes compared with existing methods. In addition, Emo-Avatar requires only a single reference image for editing and employs region-aware contrastive learning with semantic invariant CLIP guidance, ensuring consistent high-resolution output and identity preservation. Through both quantitative and qualitative assessments, Emo-Avatar demonstrates superior performance over existing methods in terms of training efficiency, rendering quality and editability in self- and cross-reenactment.

The text-driven image and video diffusion models have achieved unprecedented success in generating realistic and diverse content. Recently, the editing and variation of existing images and videos in diffusion-based generative models have garnered significant attention. However, previous works are limited to editing content with text or providing coarse personalization using a single visual clue, rendering them unsuitable for indescribable content that requires fine-grained and detailed control. In this regard, we propose a generic video editing framework called Make-A-Protagonist, which utilizes textual and visual clues to edit videos with the goal of empowering individuals to become the protagonists. Specifically, we leverage multiple experts to parse source video, target visual and textual clues, and propose a visual-textual-based video generation model that employs mask-guided denoising sampling to generate the desired output. Extensive results demonstrate the versatile and remarkable editing capabilities of Make-A-Protagonist.

Creating high-dynamic videos such as motion-rich actions and sophisticated visual effects poses a significant challenge in the field of artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, current state-of-the-art video generation methods, primarily focusing on text-to-video generation, tend to produce video clips with minimal motions despite maintaining high fidelity. We argue that relying solely on text instructions is insufficient and suboptimal for video generation. In this paper, we introduce PixelDance, a novel approach based on diffusion models that incorporates image instructions for both the first and last frames in conjunction with text instructions for video generation. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that PixelDance trained with public data exhibits significantly better proficiency in synthesizing videos with complex scenes and intricate motions, setting a new standard for video generation.

Recent advances in the diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-image generation. However, generating videos from text is a more challenging task than generating images from text, due to the much larger dataset and higher computational cost required. Most existing video generation methods use either a 3D U-Net architecture that considers the temporal dimension or autoregressive generation. These methods require large datasets and are limited in terms of computational costs compared to text-to-image generation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a simple but effective novel grid diffusion for text-to-video generation without temporal dimension in architecture and a large text-video paired dataset. We can generate a high-quality video using a fixed amount of GPU memory regardless of the number of frames by representing the video as a grid image. Additionally, since our method reduces the dimensions of the video to the dimensions of the image, various image-based methods can be applied to videos, such as text-guided video manipulation from image manipulation. Our proposed method outperforms the existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, demonstrating the suitability of our model for real-world video generation.

Videos are created to express emotion, exchange information, and share experiences. Video synthesis has intrigued researchers for a long time. Despite the rapid progress driven by advances in visual synthesis, most existing studies focus on improving the frames' quality and the transitions between them, while little progress has been made in generating longer videos. In this paper, we present a method that builds on 3D-VQGAN and transformers to generate videos with thousands of frames. Our evaluation shows that our model trained on 16-frame video clips from standard benchmarks such as UCF-101, Sky Time-lapse, and Taichi-HD datasets can generate diverse, coherent, and high-quality long videos. We also showcase conditional extensions of our approach for generating meaningful long videos by incorporating temporal information with text and audio. Videos and code can be found at https://songweige.github.io/projects/tats/index.html.

We present an efficient text-to-video generation framework based on latent diffusion models, termed MagicVideo. Given a text description, MagicVideo can generate photo-realistic video clips with high relevance to the text content. With the proposed efficient latent 3D U-Net design, MagicVideo can generate video clips with 256x256 spatial resolution on a single GPU card, which is 64x faster than the recent video diffusion model (VDM). Unlike previous works that train video generation from scratch in the RGB space, we propose to generate video clips in a low-dimensional latent space. We further utilize all the convolution operator weights of pre-trained text-to-image generative U-Net models for faster training. To achieve this, we introduce two new designs to adapt the U-Net decoder to video data: a framewise lightweight adaptor for the image-to-video distribution adjustment and a directed temporal attention module to capture frame temporal dependencies. The whole generation process is within the low-dimension latent space of a pre-trained variation auto-encoder. We demonstrate that MagicVideo can generate both realistic video content and imaginary content in a photo-realistic style with a trade-off in terms of quality and computational cost. Refer to https://magicvideo.github.io/# for more examples.

In this paper, we introduce DirectorLLM, a novel video generation model that employs a large language model (LLM) to orchestrate human poses within videos. As foundational text-to-video models rapidly evolve, the demand for high-quality human motion and interaction grows. To address this need and enhance the authenticity of human motions, we extend the LLM from a text generator to a video director and human motion simulator. Utilizing open-source resources from Llama 3, we train the DirectorLLM to generate detailed instructional signals, such as human poses, to guide video generation. This approach offloads the simulation of human motion from the video generator to the LLM, effectively creating informative outlines for human-centric scenes. These signals are used as conditions by the video renderer, facilitating more realistic and prompt-following video generation. As an independent LLM module, it can be applied to different video renderers, including UNet and DiT, with minimal effort. Experiments on automatic evaluation benchmarks and human evaluations show that our model outperforms existing ones in generating videos with higher human motion fidelity, improved prompt faithfulness, and enhanced rendered subject naturalness.

We present a video generation model that accurately reproduces object motion, changes in camera viewpoint, and new content that arises over time. Existing video generation methods often fail to produce new content as a function of time while maintaining consistencies expected in real environments, such as plausible dynamics and object persistence. A common failure case is for content to never change due to over-reliance on inductive biases to provide temporal consistency, such as a single latent code that dictates content for the entire video. On the other extreme, without long-term consistency, generated videos may morph unrealistically between different scenes. To address these limitations, we prioritize the time axis by redesigning the temporal latent representation and learning long-term consistency from data by training on longer videos. To this end, we leverage a two-phase training strategy, where we separately train using longer videos at a low resolution and shorter videos at a high resolution. To evaluate the capabilities of our model, we introduce two new benchmark datasets with explicit focus on long-term temporal dynamics.

Recent advances in text-to-image models have opened new frontiers in human-centric generation. However, these models cannot be directly employed to generate images with consistent newly coined identities. In this work, we propose CharacterFactory, a framework that allows sampling new characters with consistent identities in the latent space of GANs for diffusion models. More specifically, we consider the word embeddings of celeb names as ground truths for the identity-consistent generation task and train a GAN model to learn the mapping from a latent space to the celeb embedding space. In addition, we design a context-consistent loss to ensure that the generated identity embeddings can produce identity-consistent images in various contexts. Remarkably, the whole model only takes 10 minutes for training, and can sample infinite characters end-to-end during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate excellent performance of the proposed CharacterFactory on character creation in terms of identity consistency and editability. Furthermore, the generated characters can be seamlessly combined with the off-the-shelf image/video/3D diffusion models. We believe that the proposed CharacterFactory is an important step for identity-consistent character generation. Project page is available at: https://qinghew.github.io/CharacterFactory/.

We propose VLOGGER, a method for audio-driven human video generation from a single input image of a person, which builds on the success of recent generative diffusion models. Our method consists of 1) a stochastic human-to-3d-motion diffusion model, and 2) a novel diffusion-based architecture that augments text-to-image models with both spatial and temporal controls. This supports the generation of high quality video of variable length, easily controllable through high-level representations of human faces and bodies. In contrast to previous work, our method does not require training for each person, does not rely on face detection and cropping, generates the complete image (not just the face or the lips), and considers a broad spectrum of scenarios (e.g. visible torso or diverse subject identities) that are critical to correctly synthesize humans who communicate. We also curate MENTOR, a new and diverse dataset with 3d pose and expression annotations, one order of magnitude larger than previous ones (800,000 identities) and with dynamic gestures, on which we train and ablate our main technical contributions. VLOGGER outperforms state-of-the-art methods in three public benchmarks, considering image quality, identity preservation and temporal consistency while also generating upper-body gestures. We analyze the performance of VLOGGER with respect to multiple diversity metrics, showing that our architectural choices and the use of MENTOR benefit training a fair and unbiased model at scale. Finally we show applications in video editing and personalization.

Speech-driven facial animation is the process that automatically synthesizes talking characters based on speech signals. The majority of work in this domain creates a mapping from audio features to visual features. This approach often requires post-processing using computer graphics techniques to produce realistic albeit subject dependent results. We present an end-to-end system that generates videos of a talking head, using only a still image of a person and an audio clip containing speech, without relying on handcrafted intermediate features. Our method generates videos which have (a) lip movements that are in sync with the audio and (b) natural facial expressions such as blinks and eyebrow movements. Our temporal GAN uses 3 discriminators focused on achieving detailed frames, audio-visual synchronization, and realistic expressions. We quantify the contribution of each component in our model using an ablation study and we provide insights into the latent representation of the model. The generated videos are evaluated based on sharpness, reconstruction quality, lip-reading accuracy, synchronization as well as their ability to generate natural blinks.

We propose VidStyleODE, a spatiotemporally continuous disentangled Video representation based upon StyleGAN and Neural-ODEs. Effective traversal of the latent space learned by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has been the basis for recent breakthroughs in image editing. However, the applicability of such advancements to the video domain has been hindered by the difficulty of representing and controlling videos in the latent space of GANs. In particular, videos are composed of content (i.e., appearance) and complex motion components that require a special mechanism to disentangle and control. To achieve this, VidStyleODE encodes the video content in a pre-trained StyleGAN W_+ space and benefits from a latent ODE component to summarize the spatiotemporal dynamics of the input video. Our novel continuous video generation process then combines the two to generate high-quality and temporally consistent videos with varying frame rates. We show that our proposed method enables a variety of applications on real videos: text-guided appearance manipulation, motion manipulation, image animation, and video interpolation and extrapolation. Project website: https://cyberiada.github.io/VidStyleODE

We present VideoFactory, an innovative framework for generating high-quality open-domain videos. VideoFactory excels in producing high-definition (1376x768), widescreen (16:9) videos without watermarks, creating an engaging user experience. Generating videos guided by text instructions poses significant challenges, such as modeling the complex relationship between space and time, and the lack of large-scale text-video paired data. Previous approaches extend pretrained text-to-image generation models by adding temporal 1D convolution/attention modules for video generation. However, these approaches overlook the importance of jointly modeling space and time, inevitably leading to temporal distortions and misalignment between texts and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that strengthens the interaction between spatial and temporal perceptions. In particular, we utilize a swapped cross-attention mechanism in 3D windows that alternates the "query" role between spatial and temporal blocks, enabling mutual reinforcement for each other. To fully unlock model capabilities for high-quality video generation, we curate a large-scale video dataset called HD-VG-130M. This dataset comprises 130 million text-video pairs from the open-domain, ensuring high-definition, widescreen and watermark-free characters. Objective metrics and user studies demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of per-frame quality, temporal correlation, and text-video alignment, with clear margins.

We present VideoPoet, a language model capable of synthesizing high-quality video, with matching audio, from a large variety of conditioning signals. VideoPoet employs a decoder-only transformer architecture that processes multimodal inputs -- including images, videos, text, and audio. The training protocol follows that of Large Language Models (LLMs), consisting of two stages: pretraining and task-specific adaptation. During pretraining, VideoPoet incorporates a mixture of multimodal generative objectives within an autoregressive Transformer framework. The pretrained LLM serves as a foundation that can be adapted for a range of video generation tasks. We present empirical results demonstrating the model's state-of-the-art capabilities in zero-shot video generation, specifically highlighting VideoPoet's ability to generate high-fidelity motions. Project page: http://sites.research.google/videopoet/

Customized video generation aims to generate high-quality videos guided by text prompts and subject's reference images. However, since it is only trained on static images, the fine-tuning process of subject learning disrupts abilities of video diffusion models (VDMs) to combine concepts and generate motions. To restore these abilities, some methods use additional video similar to the prompt to fine-tune or guide the model. This requires frequent changes of guiding videos and even re-tuning of the model when generating different motions, which is very inconvenient for users. In this paper, we propose CustomCrafter, a novel framework that preserves the model's motion generation and conceptual combination abilities without additional video and fine-tuning to recovery. For preserving conceptual combination ability, we design a plug-and-play module to update few parameters in VDMs, enhancing the model's ability to capture the appearance details and the ability of concept combinations for new subjects. For motion generation, we observed that VDMs tend to restore the motion of video in the early stage of denoising, while focusing on the recovery of subject details in the later stage. Therefore, we propose Dynamic Weighted Video Sampling Strategy. Using the pluggability of our subject learning modules, we reduce the impact of this module on motion generation in the early stage of denoising, preserving the ability to generate motion of VDMs. In the later stage of denoising, we restore this module to repair the appearance details of the specified subject, thereby ensuring the fidelity of the subject's appearance. Experimental results show that our method has a significant improvement compared to previous methods.

Clipart, a pre-made graphic art form, offers a convenient and efficient way of illustrating visual content. Traditional workflows to convert static clipart images into motion sequences are laborious and time-consuming, involving numerous intricate steps like rigging, key animation and in-betweening. Recent advancements in text-to-video generation hold great potential in resolving this problem. Nevertheless, direct application of text-to-video generation models often struggles to retain the visual identity of clipart images or generate cartoon-style motions, resulting in unsatisfactory animation outcomes. In this paper, we introduce AniClipart, a system that transforms static clipart images into high-quality motion sequences guided by text-to-video priors. To generate cartoon-style and smooth motion, we first define B\'{e}zier curves over keypoints of the clipart image as a form of motion regularization. We then align the motion trajectories of the keypoints with the provided text prompt by optimizing the Video Score Distillation Sampling (VSDS) loss, which encodes adequate knowledge of natural motion within a pretrained text-to-video diffusion model. With a differentiable As-Rigid-As-Possible shape deformation algorithm, our method can be end-to-end optimized while maintaining deformation rigidity. Experimental results show that the proposed AniClipart consistently outperforms existing image-to-video generation models, in terms of text-video alignment, visual identity preservation, and motion consistency. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of AniClipart by adapting it to generate a broader array of animation formats, such as layered animation, which allows topological changes.

Cartoons and animation domain videos have very different characteristics compared to real-life images and videos. In addition, this domain carries a large variability in styles. Current computer vision and deep-learning solutions often fail on animated content because they were trained on natural images. In this paper we present a method to refine a semantic representation suitable for specific animated content. We first train a neural network on a large-scale set of animation videos and use the mapping to deep features as an embedding space. Next, we use self-supervision to refine the representation for any specific animation style by gathering many examples of animated characters in this style, using a multi-object tracking. These examples are used to define triplets for contrastive loss training. The refined semantic space allows better clustering of animated characters even when they have diverse manifestations. Using this space we can build dictionaries of characters in an animation videos, and define specialized classifiers for specific stylistic content (e.g., characters in a specific animation series) with very little user effort. These classifiers are the basis for automatically labeling characters in animation videos. We present results on a collection of characters in a variety of animation styles.

Text-to-video generative models convert textual prompts into dynamic visual content, offering wide-ranging applications in film production, gaming, and education. However, their real-world performance often falls short of user expectations. One key reason is that these models have not been trained on videos related to some topics users want to create. In this paper, we propose VideoUFO, the first Video dataset specifically curated to align with Users' FOcus in real-world scenarios. Beyond this, our VideoUFO also features: (1) minimal (0.29%) overlap with existing video datasets, and (2) videos searched exclusively via YouTube's official API under the Creative Commons license. These two attributes provide future researchers with greater freedom to broaden their training sources. The VideoUFO comprises over 1.09 million video clips, each paired with both a brief and a detailed caption (description). Specifically, through clustering, we first identify 1,291 user-focused topics from the million-scale real text-to-video prompt dataset, VidProM. Then, we use these topics to retrieve videos from YouTube, split the retrieved videos into clips, and generate both brief and detailed captions for each clip. After verifying the clips with specified topics, we are left with about 1.09 million video clips. Our experiments reveal that (1) current 16 text-to-video models do not achieve consistent performance across all user-focused topics; and (2) a simple model trained on VideoUFO outperforms others on worst-performing topics. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/WenhaoWang/VideoUFO under the CC BY 4.0 License.

With the impressive progress in diffusion-based text-to-image generation, extending such powerful generative ability to text-to-video raises enormous attention. Existing methods either require large-scale text-video pairs and a large number of training resources or learn motions that are precisely aligned with template videos. It is non-trivial to balance a trade-off between the degree of generation freedom and the resource costs for video generation. In our study, we present a few-shot-based tuning framework, LAMP, which enables text-to-image diffusion model Learn A specific Motion Pattern with 8~16 videos on a single GPU. Specifically, we design a first-frame-conditioned pipeline that uses an off-the-shelf text-to-image model for content generation so that our tuned video diffusion model mainly focuses on motion learning. The well-developed text-to-image techniques can provide visually pleasing and diverse content as generation conditions, which highly improves video quality and generation freedom. To capture the features of temporal dimension, we expand the pretrained 2D convolution layers of the T2I model to our novel temporal-spatial motion learning layers and modify the attention blocks to the temporal level. Additionally, we develop an effective inference trick, shared-noise sampling, which can improve the stability of videos with computational costs. Our method can also be flexibly applied to other tasks, e.g. real-world image animation and video editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LAMP can effectively learn the motion pattern on limited data and generate high-quality videos. The code and models are available at https://rq-wu.github.io/projects/LAMP.

As Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) advances, a variety of methods have been developed to generate text, images, videos, and 3D objects from single or multimodal inputs, contributing efforts to emulate human-like cognitive content creation. However, generating realistic large-scale scenes from a single input presents a challenge due to the complexities involved in ensuring consistency across extrapolated views generated by models. Benefiting from recent video generation models and implicit neural representations, we propose Scene123, a 3D scene generation model, that not only ensures realism and diversity through the video generation framework but also uses implicit neural fields combined with Masked Autoencoders (MAE) to effectively ensures the consistency of unseen areas across views. Specifically, we initially warp the input image (or an image generated from text) to simulate adjacent views, filling the invisible areas with the MAE model. However, these filled images usually fail to maintain view consistency, thus we utilize the produced views to optimize a neural radiance field, enhancing geometric consistency. Moreover, to further enhance the details and texture fidelity of generated views, we employ a GAN-based Loss against images derived from the input image through the video generation model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate realistic and consistent scenes from a single prompt. Both qualitative and quantitative results indicate that our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods. We show encourage video examples at https://yiyingyang12.github.io/Scene123.github.io/.

We present Imagen Video, a text-conditional video generation system based on a cascade of video diffusion models. Given a text prompt, Imagen Video generates high definition videos using a base video generation model and a sequence of interleaved spatial and temporal video super-resolution models. We describe how we scale up the system as a high definition text-to-video model including design decisions such as the choice of fully-convolutional temporal and spatial super-resolution models at certain resolutions, and the choice of the v-parameterization of diffusion models. In addition, we confirm and transfer findings from previous work on diffusion-based image generation to the video generation setting. Finally, we apply progressive distillation to our video models with classifier-free guidance for fast, high quality sampling. We find Imagen Video not only capable of generating videos of high fidelity, but also having a high degree of controllability and world knowledge, including the ability to generate diverse videos and text animations in various artistic styles and with 3D object understanding. See https://imagen.research.google/video/ for samples.

Recent advances in text-to-image generation models have unlocked vast potential for visual creativity. However, these models struggle with generation of consistent characters, a crucial aspect for numerous real-world applications such as story visualization, game development asset design, advertising, and more. Current methods typically rely on multiple pre-existing images of the target character or involve labor-intensive manual processes. In this work, we propose a fully automated solution for consistent character generation, with the sole input being a text prompt. We introduce an iterative procedure that, at each stage, identifies a coherent set of images sharing a similar identity and extracts a more consistent identity from this set. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates that our method strikes a better balance between prompt alignment and identity consistency compared to the baseline methods, and these findings are reinforced by a user study. To conclude, we showcase several practical applications of our approach. Project page is available at https://omriavrahami.com/the-chosen-one

We introduce Lumiere -- a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion -- a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. To this end, we introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution -- an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve. By deploying both spatial and (importantly) temporal down- and up-sampling and leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, our model learns to directly generate a full-frame-rate, low-resolution video by processing it in multiple space-time scales. We demonstrate state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results, and show that our design easily facilitates a wide range of content creation tasks and video editing applications, including image-to-video, video inpainting, and stylized generation.

Video generation has many unique challenges beyond those of image generation. The temporal dimension introduces extensive possible variations across frames, over which consistency and continuity may be violated. In this study, we move beyond evaluating simple actions and argue that generated videos should incorporate the emergence of new concepts and their relation transitions like in real-world videos as time progresses. To assess the Temporal Compositionality of video generation models, we propose TC-Bench, a benchmark of meticulously crafted text prompts, corresponding ground truth videos, and robust evaluation metrics. The prompts articulate the initial and final states of scenes, effectively reducing ambiguities for frame development and simplifying the assessment of transition completion. In addition, by collecting aligned real-world videos corresponding to the prompts, we expand TC-Bench's applicability from text-conditional models to image-conditional ones that can perform generative frame interpolation. We also develop new metrics to measure the completeness of component transitions in generated videos, which demonstrate significantly higher correlations with human judgments than existing metrics. Our comprehensive experimental results reveal that most video generators achieve less than 20% of the compositional changes, highlighting enormous space for future improvement. Our analysis indicates that current video generation models struggle to interpret descriptions of compositional changes and synthesize various components across different time steps.

Customized text-to-video generation aims to generate high-quality videos guided by text prompts and subject references. Current approaches designed for single subjects suffer from tackling multiple subjects, which is a more challenging and practical scenario. In this work, we aim to promote multi-subject guided text-to-video customization. We propose CustomVideo, a novel framework that can generate identity-preserving videos with the guidance of multiple subjects. To be specific, firstly, we encourage the co-occurrence of multiple subjects via composing them in a single image. Further, upon a basic text-to-video diffusion model, we design a simple yet effective attention control strategy to disentangle different subjects in the latent space of diffusion model. Moreover, to help the model focus on the specific object area, we segment the object from given reference images and provide a corresponding object mask for attention learning. Also, we collect a multi-subject text-to-video generation dataset as a comprehensive benchmark, with 69 individual subjects and 57 meaningful pairs. Extensive qualitative, quantitative, and user study results demonstrate the superiority of our method, compared with the previous state-of-the-art approaches.

Existing dynamic scene generation methods mostly rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained 3D generative models, which are typically fine-tuned on synthetic object datasets. As a result, the generated scenes are often object-centric and lack photorealism. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel pipeline designed for photorealistic text-to-4D scene generation, discarding the dependency on multi-view generative models and instead fully utilizing video generative models trained on diverse real-world datasets. Our method begins by generating a reference video using the video generation model. We then learn the canonical 3D representation of the video using a freeze-time video, delicately generated from the reference video. To handle inconsistencies in the freeze-time video, we jointly learn a per-frame deformation to model these imperfections. We then learn the temporal deformation based on the canonical representation to capture dynamic interactions in the reference video. The pipeline facilitates the generation of dynamic scenes with enhanced photorealism and structural integrity, viewable from multiple perspectives, thereby setting a new standard in 4D scene generation.

While the recent advances in research on video reenactment have yielded promising results, the approaches fall short in capturing the fine, detailed, and expressive facial features (e.g., lip-pressing, mouth puckering, mouth gaping, and wrinkles) which are crucial in generating realistic animated face videos. To this end, we propose an end-to-end expressive face video encoding approach that facilitates data-efficient high-quality video re-synthesis by optimizing low-dimensional edits of a single Identity-latent. The approach builds on StyleGAN2 image inversion and multi-stage non-linear latent-space editing to generate videos that are nearly comparable to input videos. While existing StyleGAN latent-based editing techniques focus on simply generating plausible edits of static images, we automate the latent-space editing to capture the fine expressive facial deformations in a sequence of frames using an encoding that resides in the Style-latent-space (StyleSpace) of StyleGAN2. The encoding thus obtained could be super-imposed on a single Identity-latent to facilitate re-enactment of face videos at 1024^2. The proposed framework economically captures face identity, head-pose, and complex expressive facial motions at fine levels, and thereby bypasses training, person modeling, dependence on landmarks/ keypoints, and low-resolution synthesis which tend to hamper most re-enactment approaches. The approach is designed with maximum data efficiency, where a single W+ latent and 35 parameters per frame enable high-fidelity video rendering. This pipeline can also be used for puppeteering (i.e., motion transfer).

The one-shot talking-head generation learns to synthesize a talking-head video with one source portrait image under the driving of same or different identity video. Usually these methods require plane-based pixel transformations via Jacobin matrices or facial image warps for novel poses generation. The constraints of using a single image source and pixel displacements often compromise the clarity of the synthesized images. Some methods try to improve the quality of synthesized videos by introducing additional super-resolution modules, but this will undoubtedly increase computational consumption and destroy the original data distribution. In this work, we propose an adaptive high-quality talking-head video generation method, which synthesizes high-resolution video without additional pre-trained modules. Specifically, inspired by existing super-resolution methods, we down-sample the one-shot source image, and then adaptively reconstruct high-frequency details via an encoder-decoder module, resulting in enhanced video clarity. Our method consistently improves the quality of generated videos through a straightforward yet effective strategy, substantiated by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The code and demo video are available on: https://github.com/Songluchuan/AdaSR-TalkingHead/.

In this work, we present Vlogger, a generic AI system for generating a minute-level video blog (i.e., vlog) of user descriptions. Different from short videos with a few seconds, vlog often contains a complex storyline with diversified scenes, which is challenging for most existing video generation approaches. To break through this bottleneck, our Vlogger smartly leverages Large Language Model (LLM) as Director and decomposes a long video generation task of vlog into four key stages, where we invoke various foundation models to play the critical roles of vlog professionals, including (1) Script, (2) Actor, (3) ShowMaker, and (4) Voicer. With such a design of mimicking human beings, our Vlogger can generate vlogs through explainable cooperation of top-down planning and bottom-up shooting. Moreover, we introduce a novel video diffusion model, ShowMaker, which serves as a videographer in our Vlogger for generating the video snippet of each shooting scene. By incorporating Script and Actor attentively as textual and visual prompts, it can effectively enhance spatial-temporal coherence in the snippet. Besides, we design a concise mixed training paradigm for ShowMaker, boosting its capacity for both T2V generation and prediction. Finally, the extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot T2V generation and prediction tasks. More importantly, Vlogger can generate over 5-minute vlogs from open-world descriptions, without loss of video coherence on script and actor. The code and model is all available at https://github.com/zhuangshaobin/Vlogger.

The proliferation of video content demands efficient and flexible neural network based approaches for generating new video content. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines zero-shot text-to-video generation with ControlNet to improve the output of these models. Our method takes multiple sketched frames as input and generates video output that matches the flow of these frames, building upon the Text-to-Video Zero architecture and incorporating ControlNet to enable additional input conditions. By first interpolating frames between the inputted sketches and then running Text-to-Video Zero using the new interpolated frames video as the control technique, we leverage the benefits of both zero-shot text-to-video generation and the robust control provided by ControlNet. Experiments demonstrate that our method excels at producing high-quality and remarkably consistent video content that more accurately aligns with the user's intended motion for the subject within the video. We provide a comprehensive resource package, including a demo video, project website, open-source GitHub repository, and a Colab playground to foster further research and application of our proposed method.

Both text and video data are abundant on the internet and support large-scale self-supervised learning through next token or frame prediction. However, they have not been equally leveraged: language models have had significant real-world impact, whereas video generation has remained largely limited to media entertainment. Yet video data captures important information about the physical world that is difficult to express in language. To address this gap, we discuss an under-appreciated opportunity to extend video generation to solve tasks in the real world. We observe how, akin to language, video can serve as a unified interface that can absorb internet knowledge and represent diverse tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate how, like language models, video generation can serve as planners, agents, compute engines, and environment simulators through techniques such as in-context learning, planning and reinforcement learning. We identify major impact opportunities in domains such as robotics, self-driving, and science, supported by recent work that demonstrates how such advanced capabilities in video generation are plausibly within reach. Lastly, we identify key challenges in video generation that mitigate progress. Addressing these challenges will enable video generation models to demonstrate unique value alongside language models in a wider array of AI applications.

Text-to-video (T2V) models have shown remarkable capabilities in generating diverse videos. However, they struggle to produce user-desired stylized videos due to (i) text's inherent clumsiness in expressing specific styles and (ii) the generally degraded style fidelity. To address these challenges, we introduce StyleCrafter, a generic method that enhances pre-trained T2V models with a style control adapter, enabling video generation in any style by providing a reference image. Considering the scarcity of stylized video datasets, we propose to first train a style control adapter using style-rich image datasets, then transfer the learned stylization ability to video generation through a tailor-made finetuning paradigm. To promote content-style disentanglement, we remove style descriptions from the text prompt and extract style information solely from the reference image using a decoupling learning strategy. Additionally, we design a scale-adaptive fusion module to balance the influences of text-based content features and image-based style features, which helps generalization across various text and style combinations. StyleCrafter efficiently generates high-quality stylized videos that align with the content of the texts and resemble the style of the reference images. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is more flexible and efficient than existing competitors.

Recent advancements in LLMs have accelerated the development of dialogue generation across text and images, yet video-based dialogue generation remains underexplored and presents unique challenges. In this paper, we introduce Theme-aware Video Dialogue Crafting (TVDC), a novel task aimed at generating new dialogues that align with video content and adhere to user-specified themes. We propose TV-Dialogue, a novel multi-modal agent framework that ensures both theme alignment (i.e., the dialogue revolves around the theme) and visual consistency (i.e., the dialogue matches the emotions and behaviors of characters in the video) by enabling real-time immersive interactions among video characters, thereby accurately understanding the video content and generating new dialogue that aligns with the given themes. To assess the generated dialogues, we present a multi-granularity evaluation benchmark with high accuracy, interpretability and reliability, demonstrating the effectiveness of TV-Dialogue on self-collected dataset over directly using existing LLMs. Extensive experiments reveal that TV-Dialogue can generate dialogues for videos of any length and any theme in a zero-shot manner without training. Our findings underscore the potential of TV-Dialogue for various applications, such as video re-creation, film dubbing and its use in downstream multimodal tasks.

Recent advances in internet-scale video data pretraining have led to the development of text-to-video generative models that can create high-quality videos across a broad range of visual concepts, synthesize realistic motions and render complex objects. Hence, these generative models have the potential to become general-purpose simulators of the physical world. However, it is unclear how far we are from this goal with the existing text-to-video generative models. To this end, we present VideoPhy, a benchmark designed to assess whether the generated videos follow physical commonsense for real-world activities (e.g. marbles will roll down when placed on a slanted surface). Specifically, we curate diverse prompts that involve interactions between various material types in the physical world (e.g., solid-solid, solid-fluid, fluid-fluid). We then generate videos conditioned on these captions from diverse state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models, including open models (e.g., CogVideoX) and closed models (e.g., Lumiere, Dream Machine). Our human evaluation reveals that the existing models severely lack the ability to generate videos adhering to the given text prompts, while also lack physical commonsense. Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances. VideoPhy thus highlights that the video generative models are far from accurately simulating the physical world. Finally, we propose an auto-evaluator, VideoCon-Physics, to assess the performance reliably for the newly released models.

With the availability of large-scale video datasets and the advances of diffusion models, text-driven video generation has achieved substantial progress. However, existing video generation models are typically trained on a limited number of frames, resulting in the inability to generate high-fidelity long videos during inference. Furthermore, these models only support single-text conditions, whereas real-life scenarios often require multi-text conditions as the video content changes over time. To tackle these challenges, this study explores the potential of extending the text-driven capability to generate longer videos conditioned on multiple texts. 1) We first analyze the impact of initial noise in video diffusion models. Then building upon the observation of noise, we propose FreeNoise, a tuning-free and time-efficient paradigm to enhance the generative capabilities of pretrained video diffusion models while preserving content consistency. Specifically, instead of initializing noises for all frames, we reschedule a sequence of noises for long-range correlation and perform temporal attention over them by window-based function. 2) Additionally, we design a novel motion injection method to support the generation of videos conditioned on multiple text prompts. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our paradigm in extending the generative capabilities of video diffusion models. It is noteworthy that compared with the previous best-performing method which brought about 255% extra time cost, our method incurs only negligible time cost of approximately 17%. Generated video samples are available at our website: http://haonanqiu.com/projects/FreeNoise.html.

We introduce InteractiveVideo, a user-centric framework for video generation. Different from traditional generative approaches that operate based on user-provided images or text, our framework is designed for dynamic interaction, allowing users to instruct the generative model through various intuitive mechanisms during the whole generation process, e.g. text and image prompts, painting, drag-and-drop, etc. We propose a Synergistic Multimodal Instruction mechanism, designed to seamlessly integrate users' multimodal instructions into generative models, thus facilitating a cooperative and responsive interaction between user inputs and the generative process. This approach enables iterative and fine-grained refinement of the generation result through precise and effective user instructions. With InteractiveVideo, users are given the flexibility to meticulously tailor key aspects of a video. They can paint the reference image, edit semantics, and adjust video motions until their requirements are fully met. Code, models, and demo are available at https://github.com/invictus717/InteractiveVideo

Generating videos from text has proven to be a significant challenge for existing generative models. We tackle this problem by training a conditional generative model to extract both static and dynamic information from text. This is manifested in a hybrid framework, employing a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The static features, called "gist," are used to sketch text-conditioned background color and object layout structure. Dynamic features are considered by transforming input text into an image filter. To obtain a large amount of data for training the deep-learning model, we develop a method to automatically create a matched text-video corpus from publicly available online videos. Experimental results show that the proposed framework generates plausible and diverse videos, while accurately reflecting the input text information. It significantly outperforms baseline models that directly adapt text-to-image generation procedures to produce videos. Performance is evaluated both visually and by adapting the inception score used to evaluate image generation in GANs.

Generating video stories from text prompts is a complex task. In addition to having high visual quality, videos need to realistically adhere to a sequence of text prompts whilst being consistent throughout the frames. Creating a benchmark for video generation requires data annotated over time, which contrasts with the single caption used often in video datasets. To fill this gap, we collect comprehensive human annotations on three existing datasets, and introduce StoryBench: a new, challenging multi-task benchmark to reliably evaluate forthcoming text-to-video models. Our benchmark includes three video generation tasks of increasing difficulty: action execution, where the next action must be generated starting from a conditioning video; story continuation, where a sequence of actions must be executed starting from a conditioning video; and story generation, where a video must be generated from only text prompts. We evaluate small yet strong text-to-video baselines, and show the benefits of training on story-like data algorithmically generated from existing video captions. Finally, we establish guidelines for human evaluation of video stories, and reaffirm the need of better automatic metrics for video generation. StoryBench aims at encouraging future research efforts in this exciting new area.

Existing methodologies for animating portrait images face significant challenges, particularly in handling non-frontal perspectives, rendering dynamic objects around the portrait, and generating immersive, realistic backgrounds. In this paper, we introduce the first application of a pretrained transformer-based video generative model that demonstrates strong generalization capabilities and generates highly dynamic, realistic videos for portrait animation, effectively addressing these challenges. The adoption of a new video backbone model makes previous U-Net-based methods for identity maintenance, audio conditioning, and video extrapolation inapplicable. To address this limitation, we design an identity reference network consisting of a causal 3D VAE combined with a stacked series of transformer layers, ensuring consistent facial identity across video sequences. Additionally, we investigate various speech audio conditioning and motion frame mechanisms to enable the generation of continuous video driven by speech audio. Our method is validated through experiments on benchmark and newly proposed wild datasets, demonstrating substantial improvements over prior methods in generating realistic portraits characterized by diverse orientations within dynamic and immersive scenes. Further visualizations and the source code are available at: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/hallo3/.

Talking head video generation aims to animate a human face in a still image with dynamic poses and expressions using motion information derived from a target-driving video, while maintaining the person's identity in the source image. However, dramatic and complex motions in the driving video cause ambiguous generation, because the still source image cannot provide sufficient appearance information for occluded regions or delicate expression variations, which produces severe artifacts and significantly degrades the generation quality. To tackle this problem, we propose to learn a global facial representation space, and design a novel implicit identity representation conditioned memory compensation network, coined as MCNet, for high-fidelity talking head generation.~Specifically, we devise a network module to learn a unified spatial facial meta-memory bank from all training samples, which can provide rich facial structure and appearance priors to compensate warped source facial features for the generation. Furthermore, we propose an effective query mechanism based on implicit identity representations learned from the discrete keypoints of the source image. It can greatly facilitate the retrieval of more correlated information from the memory bank for the compensation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MCNet can learn representative and complementary facial memory, and can clearly outperform previous state-of-the-art talking head generation methods on VoxCeleb1 and CelebV datasets. Please check our https://github.com/harlanhong/ICCV2023-MCNET{Project}.

In this research, we present a novel approach to motion customization in video generation, addressing the widespread gap in the thorough exploration of motion representation within video generative models. Recognizing the unique challenges posed by video's spatiotemporal nature, our method introduces Motion Embeddings, a set of explicit, temporally coherent one-dimensional embeddings derived from a given video. These embeddings are designed to integrate seamlessly with the temporal transformer modules of video diffusion models, modulating self-attention computations across frames without compromising spatial integrity. Our approach offers a compact and efficient solution to motion representation and enables complex manipulations of motion characteristics through vector arithmetic in the embedding space. Furthermore, we identify the Temporal Discrepancy in video generative models, which refers to variations in how different motion modules process temporal relationships between frames. We leverage this understanding to optimize the integration of our motion embeddings. Our contributions include the introduction of a tailored motion embedding for customization tasks, insights into the temporal processing differences in video models, and a demonstration of the practical advantages and effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments.

This paper presents EasyAnimate, an advanced method for video generation that leverages the power of transformer architecture for high-performance outcomes. We have expanded the DiT framework originally designed for 2D image synthesis to accommodate the complexities of 3D video generation by incorporating a motion module block. It is used to capture temporal dynamics, thereby ensuring the production of consistent frames and seamless motion transitions. The motion module can be adapted to various DiT baseline methods to generate video with different styles. It can also generate videos with different frame rates and resolutions during both training and inference phases, suitable for both images and videos. Moreover, we introduce slice VAE, a novel approach to condense the temporal axis, facilitating the generation of long duration videos. Currently, EasyAnimate exhibits the proficiency to generate videos with 144 frames. We provide a holistic ecosystem for video production based on DiT, encompassing aspects such as data pre-processing, VAE training, DiT models training (both the baseline model and LoRA model), and end-to-end video inference. Code is available at: https://github.com/aigc-apps/EasyAnimate. We are continuously working to enhance the performance of our method.

Existing video generation models struggle to follow complex text prompts and synthesize multiple objects, raising the need for additional grounding input for improved controllability. In this work, we propose to decompose videos into visual primitives - blob video representation, a general representation for controllable video generation. Based on blob conditions, we develop a blob-grounded video diffusion model named BlobGEN-Vid that allows users to control object motions and fine-grained object appearance. In particular, we introduce a masked 3D attention module that effectively improves regional consistency across frames. In addition, we introduce a learnable module to interpolate text embeddings so that users can control semantics in specific frames and obtain smooth object transitions. We show that our framework is model-agnostic and build BlobGEN-Vid based on both U-Net and DiT-based video diffusion models. Extensive experimental results show that BlobGEN-Vid achieves superior zero-shot video generation ability and state-of-the-art layout controllability on multiple benchmarks. When combined with an LLM for layout planning, our framework even outperforms proprietary text-to-video generators in terms of compositional accuracy.

We propose TextToon, a method to generate a drivable toonified avatar. Given a short monocular video sequence and a written instruction about the avatar style, our model can generate a high-fidelity toonified avatar that can be driven in real-time by another video with arbitrary identities. Existing related works heavily rely on multi-view modeling to recover geometry via texture embeddings, presented in a static manner, leading to control limitations. The multi-view video input also makes it difficult to deploy these models in real-world applications. To address these issues, we adopt a conditional embedding Tri-plane to learn realistic and stylized facial representations in a Gaussian deformation field. Additionally, we expand the stylization capabilities of 3D Gaussian Splatting by introducing an adaptive pixel-translation neural network and leveraging patch-aware contrastive learning to achieve high-quality images. To push our work into consumer applications, we develop a real-time system that can operate at 48 FPS on a GPU machine and 15-18 FPS on a mobile machine. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in generating textual avatars over existing methods in terms of quality and real-time animation. Please refer to our project page for more details: https://songluchuan.github.io/TextToon/.

Recently video generation has achieved substantial progress with realistic results. Nevertheless, existing AI-generated videos are usually very short clips ("shot-level") depicting a single scene. To deliver a coherent long video ("story-level"), it is desirable to have creative transition and prediction effects across different clips. This paper presents a short-to-long video diffusion model, SEINE, that focuses on generative transition and prediction. The goal is to generate high-quality long videos with smooth and creative transitions between scenes and varying lengths of shot-level videos. Specifically, we propose a random-mask video diffusion model to automatically generate transitions based on textual descriptions. By providing the images of different scenes as inputs, combined with text-based control, our model generates transition videos that ensure coherence and visual quality. Furthermore, the model can be readily extended to various tasks such as image-to-video animation and autoregressive video prediction. To conduct a comprehensive evaluation of this new generative task, we propose three assessing criteria for smooth and creative transition: temporal consistency, semantic similarity, and video-text semantic alignment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach over existing methods for generative transition and prediction, enabling the creation of story-level long videos. Project page: https://vchitect.github.io/SEINE-project/ .

Customized text-to-video generation aims to generate text-guided videos with customized user-given subjects, which has gained increasing attention recently. However, existing works are primarily limited to generating videos for a single subject, leaving the more challenging problem of customized multi-subject text-to-video generation largely unexplored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a novel VideoDreamer framework. VideoDreamer can generate temporally consistent text-guided videos that faithfully preserve the visual features of the given multiple subjects. Specifically, VideoDreamer leverages the pretrained Stable Diffusion with latent-code motion dynamics and temporal cross-frame attention as the base video generator. The video generator is further customized for the given multiple subjects by the proposed Disen-Mix Finetuning and Human-in-the-Loop Re-finetuning strategy, which can tackle the attribute binding problem of multi-subject generation. We also introduce MultiStudioBench, a benchmark for evaluating customized multi-subject text-to-video generation models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable ability of VideoDreamer to generate videos with new content such as new events and backgrounds, tailored to the customized multiple subjects. Our project page is available at https://videodreamer23.github.io/.

Image-to-video generation, which aims to generate a video starting from a given reference image, has drawn great attention. Existing methods try to extend pre-trained text-guided image diffusion models to image-guided video generation models. Nevertheless, these methods often result in either low fidelity or flickering over time due to their limitation to shallow image guidance and poor temporal consistency. To tackle these problems, we propose a high-fidelity image-to-video generation method by devising a frame retention branch based on a pre-trained video diffusion model, named DreamVideo. Instead of integrating the reference image into the diffusion process at a semantic level, our DreamVideo perceives the reference image via convolution layers and concatenates the features with the noisy latents as model input. By this means, the details of the reference image can be preserved to the greatest extent. In addition, by incorporating double-condition classifier-free guidance, a single image can be directed to videos of different actions by providing varying prompt texts. This has significant implications for controllable video generation and holds broad application prospects. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the public dataset, and both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method. Especially for fidelity, our model has a powerful image retention ability and delivers the best results in UCF101 compared to other image-to-video models to our best knowledge. Also, precise control can be achieved by giving different text prompts. Further details and comprehensive results of our model will be presented in https://anonymous0769.github.io/DreamVideo/.

Traditional 3D content creation tools empower users to bring their imagination to life by giving them direct control over a scene's geometry, appearance, motion, and camera path. Creating computer-generated videos, however, is a tedious manual process, which can be automated by emerging text-to-video diffusion models. Despite great promise, video diffusion models are difficult to control, hindering a user to apply their own creativity rather than amplifying it. To address this challenge, we present a novel approach that combines the controllability of dynamic 3D meshes with the expressivity and editability of emerging diffusion models. For this purpose, our approach takes an animated, low-fidelity rendered mesh as input and injects the ground truth correspondence information obtained from the dynamic mesh into various stages of a pre-trained text-to-image generation model to output high-quality and temporally consistent frames. We demonstrate our approach on various examples where motion can be obtained by animating rigged assets or changing the camera path.

Unconditional video generation is a challenging task that involves synthesizing high-quality videos that are both coherent and of extended duration. To address this challenge, researchers have used pretrained StyleGAN image generators for high-quality frame synthesis and focused on motion generator design. The motion generator is trained in an autoregressive manner using heavy 3D convolutional discriminators to ensure motion coherence during video generation. In this paper, we introduce a novel motion generator design that uses a learning-based inversion network for GAN. The encoder in our method captures rich and smooth priors from encoding images to latents, and given the latent of an initially generated frame as guidance, our method can generate smooth future latent by modulating the inversion encoder temporally. Our method enjoys the advantage of sparse training and naturally constrains the generation space of our motion generator with the inversion network guided by the initial frame, eliminating the need for heavy discriminators. Moreover, our method supports style transfer with simple fine-tuning when the encoder is paired with a pretrained StyleGAN generator. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method in generating long and high-resolution videos with decent single-frame quality and temporal consistency.

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

We present PERSE, a method for building an animatable personalized generative avatar from a reference portrait. Our avatar model enables facial attribute editing in a continuous and disentangled latent space to control each facial attribute, while preserving the individual's identity. To achieve this, our method begins by synthesizing large-scale synthetic 2D video datasets, where each video contains consistent changes in the facial expression and viewpoint, combined with a variation in a specific facial attribute from the original input. We propose a novel pipeline to produce high-quality, photorealistic 2D videos with facial attribute editing. Leveraging this synthetic attribute dataset, we present a personalized avatar creation method based on the 3D Gaussian Splatting, learning a continuous and disentangled latent space for intuitive facial attribute manipulation. To enforce smooth transitions in this latent space, we introduce a latent space regularization technique by using interpolated 2D faces as supervision. Compared to previous approaches, we demonstrate that PERSE generates high-quality avatars with interpolated attributes while preserving identity of reference person.

Recently, video generation has achieved significant rapid development based on superior text-to-image generation techniques. In this work, we propose a high fidelity framework for image-to-video generation, named AtomoVideo. Based on multi-granularity image injection, we achieve higher fidelity of the generated video to the given image. In addition, thanks to high quality datasets and training strategies, we achieve greater motion intensity while maintaining superior temporal consistency and stability. Our architecture extends flexibly to the video frame prediction task, enabling long sequence prediction through iterative generation. Furthermore, due to the design of adapter training, our approach can be well combined with existing personalised models and controllable modules. By quantitatively and qualitatively evaluation, AtomoVideo achieves superior results compared to popular methods, more examples can be found on our project website: https://atomo- video.github.io/.

Generative inbetweening aims to generate intermediate frame sequences by utilizing two key frames as input. Although remarkable progress has been made in video generation models, generative inbetweening still faces challenges in maintaining temporal stability due to the ambiguous interpolation path between two key frames. This issue becomes particularly severe when there is a large motion gap between input frames. In this paper, we propose a straightforward yet highly effective Frame-wise Conditions-driven Video Generation (FCVG) method that significantly enhances the temporal stability of interpolated video frames. Specifically, our FCVG provides an explicit condition for each frame, making it much easier to identify the interpolation path between two input frames and thus ensuring temporally stable production of visually plausible video frames. To achieve this, we suggest extracting matched lines from two input frames that can then be easily interpolated frame by frame, serving as frame-wise conditions seamlessly integrated into existing video generation models. In extensive evaluations covering diverse scenarios such as natural landscapes, complex human poses, camera movements and animations, existing methods often exhibit incoherent transitions across frames. In contrast, our FCVG demonstrates the capability to generate temporally stable videos using both linear and non-linear interpolation curves. Our project page and code are available at https://fcvg-inbetween.github.io/.

The production of 2D animation follows an industry-standard workflow, encompassing four essential stages: character design, keyframe animation, in-betweening, and coloring. Our research focuses on reducing the labor costs in the above process by harnessing the potential of increasingly powerful generative AI. Using video diffusion models as the foundation, AniDoc emerges as a video line art colorization tool, which automatically converts sketch sequences into colored animations following the reference character specification. Our model exploits correspondence matching as an explicit guidance, yielding strong robustness to the variations (e.g., posture) between the reference character and each line art frame. In addition, our model could even automate the in-betweening process, such that users can easily create a temporally consistent animation by simply providing a character image as well as the start and end sketches. Our code is available at: https://yihao-meng.github.io/AniDoc_demo.

Diffusion based video generation has received extensive attention and achieved considerable success within both the academic and industrial communities. However, current efforts are mainly concentrated on single-objective or single-task video generation, such as generation driven by text, by image, or by a combination of text and image. This cannot fully meet the needs of real-world application scenarios, as users are likely to input images and text conditions in a flexible manner, either individually or in combination. To address this, we propose a Unified-modal Video Genearation system that is capable of handling multiple video generation tasks across text and image modalities. To this end, we revisit the various video generation tasks within our system from the perspective of generative freedom, and classify them into high-freedom and low-freedom video generation categories. For high-freedom video generation, we employ Multi-condition Cross Attention to generate videos that align with the semantics of the input images or text. For low-freedom video generation, we introduce Biased Gaussian Noise to replace the pure random Gaussian Noise, which helps to better preserve the content of the input conditions. Our method achieves the lowest Fr\'echet Video Distance (FVD) on the public academic benchmark MSR-VTT, surpasses the current open-source methods in human evaluations, and is on par with the current close-source method Gen2. For more samples, visit https://univg-baidu.github.io.

Identity-consistent video generation seeks to synthesize videos that are guided by both textual prompts and reference images of entities. Current approaches typically utilize cross-attention layers to integrate the appearance of the entity, which predominantly captures semantic attributes, resulting in compromised fidelity of entities. Moreover, these methods necessitate iterative fine-tuning for each new entity encountered, thereby limiting their applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce VideoAssembler, a novel end-to-end framework for identity-consistent video generation that can conduct inference directly when encountering new entities. VideoAssembler is adept at producing videos that are not only flexible with respect to the input reference entities but also responsive to textual conditions. Additionally, by modulating the quantity of input images for the entity, VideoAssembler enables the execution of tasks ranging from image-to-video generation to sophisticated video editing. VideoAssembler comprises two principal components: the Reference Entity Pyramid (REP) encoder and the Entity-Prompt Attention Fusion (EPAF) module. The REP encoder is designed to infuse comprehensive appearance details into the denoising stages of the stable diffusion model. Concurrently, the EPAF module is utilized to integrate text-aligned features effectively. Furthermore, to mitigate the challenge of scarce data, we present a methodology for the preprocessing of training data. Our evaluation of the VideoAssembler framework on the UCF-101, MSR-VTT, and DAVIS datasets indicates that it achieves good performances in both quantitative and qualitative analyses (346.84 in FVD and 48.01 in IS on UCF-101). Our project page is at https://gulucaptain.github.io/videoassembler/.

The recent innovations and breakthroughs in diffusion models have significantly expanded the possibilities of generating high-quality videos for the given prompts. Most existing works tackle the single-scene scenario with only one video event occurring in a single background. Extending to generate multi-scene videos nevertheless is not trivial and necessitates to nicely manage the logic in between while preserving the consistent visual appearance of key content across video scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely VideoDrafter, for content-consistent multi-scene video generation. Technically, VideoDrafter leverages Large Language Models (LLM) to convert the input prompt into comprehensive multi-scene script that benefits from the logical knowledge learnt by LLM. The script for each scene includes a prompt describing the event, the foreground/background entities, as well as camera movement. VideoDrafter identifies the common entities throughout the script and asks LLM to detail each entity. The resultant entity description is then fed into a text-to-image model to generate a reference image for each entity. Finally, VideoDrafter outputs a multi-scene video by generating each scene video via a diffusion process that takes the reference images, the descriptive prompt of the event and camera movement into account. The diffusion model incorporates the reference images as the condition and alignment to strengthen the content consistency of multi-scene videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoDrafter outperforms the SOTA video generation models in terms of visual quality, content consistency, and user preference.

Text-to-video generation enhances content creation but is highly computationally intensive: The computational cost of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) scales quadratically in the number of pixels. This makes minute-length video generation extremely expensive, limiting most existing models to generating videos of only 10-20 seconds length. We propose a Linear-complexity text-to-video Generation (LinGen) framework whose cost scales linearly in the number of pixels. For the first time, LinGen enables high-resolution minute-length video generation on a single GPU without compromising quality. It replaces the computationally-dominant and quadratic-complexity block, self-attention, with a linear-complexity block called MATE, which consists of an MA-branch and a TE-branch. The MA-branch targets short-to-long-range correlations, combining a bidirectional Mamba2 block with our token rearrangement method, Rotary Major Scan, and our review tokens developed for long video generation. The TE-branch is a novel TEmporal Swin Attention block that focuses on temporal correlations between adjacent tokens and medium-range tokens. The MATE block addresses the adjacency preservation issue of Mamba and improves the consistency of generated videos significantly. Experimental results show that LinGen outperforms DiT (with a 75.6% win rate) in video quality with up to 15times (11.5times) FLOPs (latency) reduction. Furthermore, both automatic metrics and human evaluation demonstrate our LinGen-4B yields comparable video quality to state-of-the-art models (with a 50.5%, 52.1%, 49.1% win rate with respect to Gen-3, LumaLabs, and Kling, respectively). This paves the way to hour-length movie generation and real-time interactive video generation. We provide 68s video generation results and more examples in our project website: https://lineargen.github.io/.

Contemporary models for generating images show remarkable quality and versatility. Swayed by these advantages, the research community repurposes them to generate videos. Since video content is highly redundant, we argue that naively bringing advances of image models to the video generation domain reduces motion fidelity, visual quality and impairs scalability. In this work, we build Snap Video, a video-first model that systematically addresses these challenges. To do that, we first extend the EDM framework to take into account spatially and temporally redundant pixels and naturally support video generation. Second, we show that a U-Net - a workhorse behind image generation - scales poorly when generating videos, requiring significant computational overhead. Hence, we propose a new transformer-based architecture that trains 3.31 times faster than U-Nets (and is ~4.5 faster at inference). This allows us to efficiently train a text-to-video model with billions of parameters for the first time, reach state-of-the-art results on a number of benchmarks, and generate videos with substantially higher quality, temporal consistency, and motion complexity. The user studies showed that our model was favored by a large margin over the most recent methods. See our website at https://snap-research.github.io/snapvideo/.

Text-to-video generation models have shown significant progress in the recent years. However, they still struggle with generating complex dynamic scenes based on compositional text prompts, such as attribute binding for multiple objects, temporal dynamics associated with different objects, and interactions between objects. Our key motivation is that complex tasks can be decomposed into simpler ones, each handled by a role-specialized MLLM agent. Multiple agents can collaborate together to achieve collective intelligence for complex goals. We propose GenMAC, an iterative, multi-agent framework that enables compositional text-to-video generation. The collaborative workflow includes three stages: Design, Generation, and Redesign, with an iterative loop between the Generation and Redesign stages to progressively verify and refine the generated videos. The Redesign stage is the most challenging stage that aims to verify the generated videos, suggest corrections, and redesign the text prompts, frame-wise layouts, and guidance scales for the next iteration of generation. To avoid hallucination of a single MLLM agent, we decompose this stage to four sequentially-executed MLLM-based agents: verification agent, suggestion agent, correction agent, and output structuring agent. Furthermore, to tackle diverse scenarios of compositional text-to-video generation, we design a self-routing mechanism to adaptively select the proper correction agent from a collection of correction agents each specialized for one scenario. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GenMAC, achieving state-of-the art performance in compositional text-to-video generation.

The vision and language generative models have been overgrown in recent years. For video generation, various open-sourced models and public-available services are released for generating high-visual quality videos. However, these methods often use a few academic metrics, for example, FVD or IS, to evaluate the performance. We argue that it is hard to judge the large conditional generative models from the simple metrics since these models are often trained on very large datasets with multi-aspect abilities. Thus, we propose a new framework and pipeline to exhaustively evaluate the performance of the generated videos. To achieve this, we first conduct a new prompt list for text-to-video generation by analyzing the real-world prompt list with the help of the large language model. Then, we evaluate the state-of-the-art video generative models on our carefully designed benchmarks, in terms of visual qualities, content qualities, motion qualities, and text-caption alignment with around 18 objective metrics. To obtain the final leaderboard of the models, we also fit a series of coefficients to align the objective metrics to the users' opinions. Based on the proposed opinion alignment method, our final score shows a higher correlation than simply averaging the metrics, showing the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation method.

The growing demand for high-fidelity video generation from textual descriptions has catalyzed significant research in this field. In this work, we introduce MagicVideo-V2 that integrates the text-to-image model, video motion generator, reference image embedding module and frame interpolation module into an end-to-end video generation pipeline. Benefiting from these architecture designs, MagicVideo-V2 can generate an aesthetically pleasing, high-resolution video with remarkable fidelity and smoothness. It demonstrates superior performance over leading Text-to-Video systems such as Runway, Pika 1.0, Morph, Moon Valley and Stable Video Diffusion model via user evaluation at large scale.

Commercial video generation models have exhibited realistic, high-fidelity results but are still restricted to limited access. One crucial obstacle for large-scale applications is the expensive training and inference cost. In this paper, we argue that videos contain much more redundant information than images, thus can be encoded by very few motion latents based on a content image. Towards this goal, we design an image-conditioned VAE to encode a video to an extremely compressed motion latent space. This magic Reducio charm enables 64x reduction of latents compared to a common 2D VAE, without sacrificing the quality. Training diffusion models on such a compact representation easily allows for generating 1K resolution videos. We then adopt a two-stage video generation paradigm, which performs text-to-image and text-image-to-video sequentially. Extensive experiments show that our Reducio-DiT achieves strong performance in evaluation, though trained with limited GPU resources. More importantly, our method significantly boost the efficiency of video LDMs both in training and inference. We train Reducio-DiT in around 3.2K training hours in total and generate a 16-frame 1024*1024 video clip within 15.5 seconds on a single A100 GPU. Code released at https://github.com/microsoft/Reducio-VAE .

We present VideoGPT: a conceptually simple architecture for scaling likelihood based generative modeling to natural videos. VideoGPT uses VQ-VAE that learns downsampled discrete latent representations of a raw video by employing 3D convolutions and axial self-attention. A simple GPT-like architecture is then used to autoregressively model the discrete latents using spatio-temporal position encodings. Despite the simplicity in formulation and ease of training, our architecture is able to generate samples competitive with state-of-the-art GAN models for video generation on the BAIR Robot dataset, and generate high fidelity natural videos from UCF-101 and Tumbler GIF Dataset (TGIF). We hope our proposed architecture serves as a reproducible reference for a minimalistic implementation of transformer based video generation models. Samples and code are available at https://wilson1yan.github.io/videogpt/index.html

Text-driven generation models are flourishing in video generation and editing. However, face-centric text-to-video generation remains a challenge due to the lack of a suitable dataset containing high-quality videos and highly relevant texts. This paper presents CelebV-Text, a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality dataset of facial text-video pairs, to facilitate research on facial text-to-video generation tasks. CelebV-Text comprises 70,000 in-the-wild face video clips with diverse visual content, each paired with 20 texts generated using the proposed semi-automatic text generation strategy. The provided texts are of high quality, describing both static and dynamic attributes precisely. The superiority of CelebV-Text over other datasets is demonstrated via comprehensive statistical analysis of the videos, texts, and text-video relevance. The effectiveness and potential of CelebV-Text are further shown through extensive self-evaluation. A benchmark is constructed with representative methods to standardize the evaluation of the facial text-to-video generation task. All data and models are publicly available.

While recent research has progressively overcome the low-resolution constraint of one-shot face video re-enactment with the help of StyleGAN's high-fidelity portrait generation, these approaches rely on at least one of the following: explicit 2D/3D priors, optical flow based warping as motion descriptors, off-the-shelf encoders, etc., which constrain their performance (e.g., inconsistent predictions, inability to capture fine facial details and accessories, poor generalization, artifacts). We propose an end-to-end framework for simultaneously supporting face attribute edits, facial motions and deformations, and facial identity control for video generation. It employs a hybrid latent-space that encodes a given frame into a pair of latents: Identity latent, W_{ID}, and Facial deformation latent, S_F, that respectively reside in the W+ and SS spaces of StyleGAN2. Thereby, incorporating the impressive editability-distortion trade-off of W+ and the high disentanglement properties of SS. These hybrid latents employ the StyleGAN2 generator to achieve high-fidelity face video re-enactment at 1024^2. Furthermore, the model supports the generation of realistic re-enactment videos with other latent-based semantic edits (e.g., beard, age, make-up, etc.). Qualitative and quantitative analyses performed against state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.

Imagine an interesting multimodal interactive scenario that you can see, hear, and chat with an AI-generated digital character, who is capable of behaving like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, as a DEEP copy from appearance to personality. Towards this fantastic multimodal chatting scenario, we propose a novel task, named Deep Personalized Character Creation (DPCC): creating multimodal chat personalized characters from multimodal data such as TV shows. Specifically, given a single- or multi-modality input (text, audio, video), the goal of DPCC is to generate a multi-modality (text, audio, video) response, which should be well-matched the personality of a specific character such as Sheldon, and of high quality as well. To support this novel task, we further collect a character centric multimodal dialogue dataset, named Deep Personalized Character Dataset (DPCD), from TV shows. DPCD contains character-specific multimodal dialogue data of ~10k utterances and ~6 hours of audio/video per character, which is around 10 times larger compared to existing related datasets.On DPCD, we present a baseline method for the DPCC task and create 5 Deep personalized digital Characters (DeepCharacters) from Big Bang TV Shows. We conduct both subjective and objective experiments to evaluate the multimodal response from DeepCharacters in terms of characterization and quality. The results demonstrates that, on our collected DPCD dataset, the proposed baseline can create personalized digital characters for generating multimodal response.Our collected DPCD dataset, the code of data collection and our baseline will be published soon.

Generating temporally coherent high fidelity video is an important milestone in generative modeling research. We make progress towards this milestone by proposing a diffusion model for video generation that shows very promising initial results. Our model is a natural extension of the standard image diffusion architecture, and it enables jointly training from image and video data, which we find to reduce the variance of minibatch gradients and speed up optimization. To generate long and higher resolution videos we introduce a new conditional sampling technique for spatial and temporal video extension that performs better than previously proposed methods. We present the first results on a large text-conditioned video generation task, as well as state-of-the-art results on established benchmarks for video prediction and unconditional video generation. Supplementary material is available at https://video-diffusion.github.io/

Creating content for a specific identity (ID) has shown significant interest in the field of generative models. In the field of text-to-image generation (T2I), subject-driven content generation has achieved great progress with the ID in the images controllable. However, extending it to video generation is not well explored. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective subject identity controllable video generation framework, termed Video Custom Diffusion (VCD). With a specified subject ID defined by a few images, VCD reinforces the identity information extraction and injects frame-wise correlation at the initialization stage for stable video outputs with identity preserved to a large extent. To achieve this, we propose three novel components that are essential for high-quality ID preservation: 1) an ID module trained with the cropped identity by prompt-to-segmentation to disentangle the ID information and the background noise for more accurate ID token learning; 2) a text-to-video (T2V) VCD module with 3D Gaussian Noise Prior for better inter-frame consistency and 3) video-to-video (V2V) Face VCD and Tiled VCD modules to deblur the face and upscale the video for higher resolution. Despite its simplicity, we conducted extensive experiments to verify that VCD is able to generate stable and high-quality videos with better ID over the selected strong baselines. Besides, due to the transferability of the ID module, VCD is also working well with finetuned text-to-image models available publically, further improving its usability. The codes are available at https://github.com/Zhen-Dong/Magic-Me.

Text-to-video (T2V) generation has gained significant attention due to its wide applications to video generation, editing, enhancement and translation, \etc. However, high-quality (HQ) video synthesis is extremely challenging because of the diverse and complex motions existed in real world. Most existing works struggle to address this problem by collecting large-scale HQ videos, which are inaccessible to the community. In this work, we show that publicly available limited and low-quality (LQ) data are sufficient to train a HQ video generator without recaptioning or finetuning. We factorize the whole T2V generation process into two steps: generating an image conditioned on a highly descriptive caption, and synthesizing the video conditioned on the generated image and a concise caption of motion details. Specifically, we present Factorized-Dreamer, a factorized spatiotemporal framework with several critical designs for T2V generation, including an adapter to combine text and image embeddings, a pixel-aware cross attention module to capture pixel-level image information, a T5 text encoder to better understand motion description, and a PredictNet to supervise optical flows. We further present a noise schedule, which plays a key role in ensuring the quality and stability of video generation. Our model lowers the requirements in detailed captions and HQ videos, and can be directly trained on limited LQ datasets with noisy and brief captions such as WebVid-10M, largely alleviating the cost to collect large-scale HQ video-text pairs. Extensive experiments in a variety of T2V and image-to-video generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Factorized-Dreamer. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/yangxy/Factorized-Dreamer/.

We show how to learn a map that takes a content code, derived from a face image, and a randomly chosen style code to an anime image. We derive an adversarial loss from our simple and effective definitions of style and content. This adversarial loss guarantees the map is diverse -- a very wide range of anime can be produced from a single content code. Under plausible assumptions, the map is not just diverse, but also correctly represents the probability of an anime, conditioned on an input face. In contrast, current multimodal generation procedures cannot capture the complex styles that appear in anime. Extensive quantitative experiments support the idea the map is correct. Extensive qualitative results show that the method can generate a much more diverse range of styles than SOTA comparisons. Finally, we show that our formalization of content and style allows us to perform video to video translation without ever training on videos.

The essence of a video lies in its dynamic motions, including character actions, object movements, and camera movements. While text-to-video generative diffusion models have recently advanced in creating diverse contents, controlling specific motions through text prompts remains a significant challenge. A primary issue is the coupling of appearance and motion, often leading to overfitting on appearance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce MotionCrafter, a novel one-shot instance-guided motion customization method. MotionCrafter employs a parallel spatial-temporal architecture that injects the reference motion into the temporal component of the base model, while the spatial module is independently adjusted for character or style control. To enhance the disentanglement of motion and appearance, we propose an innovative dual-branch motion disentanglement approach, comprising a motion disentanglement loss and an appearance prior enhancement strategy. During training, a frozen base model provides appearance normalization, effectively separating appearance from motion and thereby preserving diversity. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments, along with user preference tests, demonstrate that MotionCrafter can successfully integrate dynamic motions while preserving the coherence and quality of the base model with a wide range of appearance generation capabilities. Project page: https://zyxelsa.github.io/homepage-motioncrafter. Codes are available at https://github.com/zyxElsa/MotionCrafter.

Audio Description (AD) is the task of generating descriptions of visual content, at suitable time intervals, for the benefit of visually impaired audiences. For movies, this presents notable challenges -- AD must occur only during existing pauses in dialogue, should refer to characters by name, and ought to aid understanding of the storyline as a whole. To this end, we develop a new model for automatically generating movie AD, given CLIP visual features of the frames, the cast list, and the temporal locations of the speech; addressing all three of the 'who', 'when', and 'what' questions: (i) who -- we introduce a character bank consisting of the character's name, the actor that played the part, and a CLIP feature of their face, for the principal cast of each movie, and demonstrate how this can be used to improve naming in the generated AD; (ii) when -- we investigate several models for determining whether an AD should be generated for a time interval or not, based on the visual content of the interval and its neighbours; and (iii) what -- we implement a new vision-language model for this task, that can ingest the proposals from the character bank, whilst conditioning on the visual features using cross-attention, and demonstrate how this improves over previous architectures for AD text generation in an apples-to-apples comparison.

The current text-to-video (T2V) generation has made significant progress in synthesizing realistic general videos, but it is still under-explored in identity-specific human video generation with customized ID images. The key challenge lies in maintaining high ID fidelity consistently while preserving the original motion dynamic and semantic following after the identity injection. Current video identity customization methods mainly rely on reconstructing given identity images on text-to-image models, which have a divergent distribution with the T2V model. This process introduces a tuning-inference gap, leading to dynamic and semantic degradation. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel framework, dubbed PersonalVideo, that applies direct supervision on videos synthesized by the T2V model to bridge the gap. Specifically, we introduce a learnable Isolated Identity Adapter to customize the specific identity non-intrusively, which does not comprise the original T2V model's abilities (e.g., motion dynamic and semantic following). With the non-reconstructive identity loss, we further employ simulated prompt augmentation to reduce overfitting by supervising generated results in more semantic scenarios, gaining good robustness even with only a single reference image available. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superiority in delivering high identity faithfulness while preserving the inherent video generation qualities of the original T2V model, outshining prior approaches. Notably, our PersonalVideo seamlessly integrates with pre-trained SD components, such as ControlNet and style LoRA, requiring no extra tuning overhead.

We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.

Large-scale text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models have great progress in recent years in terms of visual quality, motion and temporal consistency. However, the generation process is still a black box, where all attributes (e.g., appearance, motion) are learned and generated jointly without precise control ability other than rough text descriptions. Inspired by image animation which decouples the video as one specific appearance with the corresponding motion, we propose AnimateZero to unveil the pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model, i.e., AnimateDiff, and provide more precise appearance and motion control abilities for it. For appearance control, we borrow intermediate latents and their features from the text-to-image (T2I) generation for ensuring the generated first frame is equal to the given generated image. For temporal control, we replace the global temporal attention of the original T2V model with our proposed positional-corrected window attention to ensure other frames align with the first frame well. Empowered by the proposed methods, AnimateZero can successfully control the generating progress without further training. As a zero-shot image animator for given images, AnimateZero also enables multiple new applications, including interactive video generation and real image animation. The detailed experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in both T2V and related applications.

Generating realistic human videos remains a challenging task, with the most effective methods currently relying on a human motion sequence as a control signal. Existing approaches often use existing motion extracted from other videos, which restricts applications to specific motion types and global scene matching. We propose Move-in-2D, a novel approach to generate human motion sequences conditioned on a scene image, allowing for diverse motion that adapts to different scenes. Our approach utilizes a diffusion model that accepts both a scene image and text prompt as inputs, producing a motion sequence tailored to the scene. To train this model, we collect a large-scale video dataset featuring single-human activities, annotating each video with the corresponding human motion as the target output. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively predicts human motion that aligns with the scene image after projection. Furthermore, we show that the generated motion sequence improves human motion quality in video synthesis tasks.

Zero-shot talking avatar generation aims at synthesizing natural talking videos from speech and a single portrait image. Previous methods have relied on domain-specific heuristics such as warping-based motion representation and 3D Morphable Models, which limit the naturalness and diversity of the generated avatars. In this work, we introduce GAIA (Generative AI for Avatar), which eliminates the domain priors in talking avatar generation. In light of the observation that the speech only drives the motion of the avatar while the appearance of the avatar and the background typically remain the same throughout the entire video, we divide our approach into two stages: 1) disentangling each frame into motion and appearance representations; 2) generating motion sequences conditioned on the speech and reference portrait image. We collect a large-scale high-quality talking avatar dataset and train the model on it with different scales (up to 2B parameters). Experimental results verify the superiority, scalability, and flexibility of GAIA as 1) the resulting model beats previous baseline models in terms of naturalness, diversity, lip-sync quality, and visual quality; 2) the framework is scalable since larger models yield better results; 3) it is general and enables different applications like controllable talking avatar generation and text-instructed avatar generation.

This paper presents Video-P2P, a novel framework for real-world video editing with cross-attention control. While attention control has proven effective for image editing with pre-trained image generation models, there are currently no large-scale video generation models publicly available. Video-P2P addresses this limitation by adapting an image generation diffusion model to complete various video editing tasks. Specifically, we propose to first tune a Text-to-Set (T2S) model to complete an approximate inversion and then optimize a shared unconditional embedding to achieve accurate video inversion with a small memory cost. For attention control, we introduce a novel decoupled-guidance strategy, which uses different guidance strategies for the source and target prompts. The optimized unconditional embedding for the source prompt improves reconstruction ability, while an initialized unconditional embedding for the target prompt enhances editability. Incorporating the attention maps of these two branches enables detailed editing. These technical designs enable various text-driven editing applications, including word swap, prompt refinement, and attention re-weighting. Video-P2P works well on real-world videos for generating new characters while optimally preserving their original poses and scenes. It significantly outperforms previous approaches.

Recent advances in generative modeling have led to promising progress on synthesizing 3D human motion from text, with methods that can generate character animations from short prompts and specified durations. However, using a single text prompt as input lacks the fine-grained control needed by animators, such as composing multiple actions and defining precise durations for parts of the motion. To address this, we introduce the new problem of timeline control for text-driven motion synthesis, which provides an intuitive, yet fine-grained, input interface for users. Instead of a single prompt, users can specify a multi-track timeline of multiple prompts organized in temporal intervals that may overlap. This enables specifying the exact timings of each action and composing multiple actions in sequence or at overlapping intervals. To generate composite animations from a multi-track timeline, we propose a new test-time denoising method. This method can be integrated with any pre-trained motion diffusion model to synthesize realistic motions that accurately reflect the timeline. At every step of denoising, our method processes each timeline interval (text prompt) individually, subsequently aggregating the predictions with consideration for the specific body parts engaged in each action. Experimental comparisons and ablations validate that our method produces realistic motions that respect the semantics and timing of given text prompts. Our code and models are publicly available at https://mathis.petrovich.fr/stmc.

In this paper, we show that useful video representations can be learned from synthetic videos and natural images, without incorporating natural videos in the training. We propose a progression of video datasets synthesized by simple generative processes, that model a growing set of natural video properties (e.g. motion, acceleration, and shape transformations). The downstream performance of video models pre-trained on these generated datasets gradually increases with the dataset progression. A VideoMAE model pre-trained on our synthetic videos closes 97.2% of the performance gap on UCF101 action classification between training from scratch and self-supervised pre-training from natural videos, and outperforms the pre-trained model on HMDB51. Introducing crops of static images to the pre-training stage results in similar performance to UCF101 pre-training and outperforms the UCF101 pre-trained model on 11 out of 14 out-of-distribution datasets of UCF101-P. Analyzing the low-level properties of the datasets, we identify correlations between frame diversity, frame similarity to natural data, and downstream performance. Our approach provides a more controllable and transparent alternative to video data curation processes for pre-training.

We introduce ToonCrafter, a novel approach that transcends traditional correspondence-based cartoon video interpolation, paving the way for generative interpolation. Traditional methods, that implicitly assume linear motion and the absence of complicated phenomena like dis-occlusion, often struggle with the exaggerated non-linear and large motions with occlusion commonly found in cartoons, resulting in implausible or even failed interpolation results. To overcome these limitations, we explore the potential of adapting live-action video priors to better suit cartoon interpolation within a generative framework. ToonCrafter effectively addresses the challenges faced when applying live-action video motion priors to generative cartoon interpolation. First, we design a toon rectification learning strategy that seamlessly adapts live-action video priors to the cartoon domain, resolving the domain gap and content leakage issues. Next, we introduce a dual-reference-based 3D decoder to compensate for lost details due to the highly compressed latent prior spaces, ensuring the preservation of fine details in interpolation results. Finally, we design a flexible sketch encoder that empowers users with interactive control over the interpolation results. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method not only produces visually convincing and more natural dynamics, but also effectively handles dis-occlusion. The comparative evaluation demonstrates the notable superiority of our approach over existing competitors.

We present W.A.L.T, a transformer-based approach for photorealistic video generation via diffusion modeling. Our approach has two key design decisions. First, we use a causal encoder to jointly compress images and videos within a unified latent space, enabling training and generation across modalities. Second, for memory and training efficiency, we use a window attention architecture tailored for joint spatial and spatiotemporal generative modeling. Taken together these design decisions enable us to achieve state-of-the-art performance on established video (UCF-101 and Kinetics-600) and image (ImageNet) generation benchmarks without using classifier free guidance. Finally, we also train a cascade of three models for the task of text-to-video generation consisting of a base latent video diffusion model, and two video super-resolution diffusion models to generate videos of 512 times 896 resolution at 8 frames per second.

Customized generation using diffusion models has made impressive progress in image generation, but remains unsatisfactory in the challenging video generation task, as it requires the controllability of both subjects and motions. To that end, we present DreamVideo, a novel approach to generating personalized videos from a few static images of the desired subject and a few videos of target motion. DreamVideo decouples this task into two stages, subject learning and motion learning, by leveraging a pre-trained video diffusion model. The subject learning aims to accurately capture the fine appearance of the subject from provided images, which is achieved by combining textual inversion and fine-tuning of our carefully designed identity adapter. In motion learning, we architect a motion adapter and fine-tune it on the given videos to effectively model the target motion pattern. Combining these two lightweight and efficient adapters allows for flexible customization of any subject with any motion. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our DreamVideo over the state-of-the-art methods for customized video generation. Our project page is at https://dreamvideo-t2v.github.io.

We present ARTcdotV, an efficient framework for auto-regressive video generation with diffusion models. Unlike existing methods that generate entire videos in one-shot, ARTcdotV generates a single frame at a time, conditioned on the previous ones. The framework offers three distinct advantages. First, it only learns simple continual motions between adjacent frames, therefore avoiding modeling complex long-range motions that require huge training data. Second, it preserves the high-fidelity generation ability of the pre-trained image diffusion models by making only minimal network modifications. Third, it can generate arbitrarily long videos conditioned on a variety of prompts such as text, image or their combinations, making it highly versatile and flexible. To combat the common drifting issue in AR models, we propose masked diffusion model which implicitly learns which information can be drawn from reference images rather than network predictions, in order to reduce the risk of generating inconsistent appearances that cause drifting. Moreover, we further enhance generation coherence by conditioning it on the initial frame, which typically contains minimal noise. This is particularly useful for long video generation. When trained for only two weeks on four GPUs, ARTcdotV already can generate videos with natural motions, rich details and a high level of aesthetic quality. Besides, it enables various appealing applications, e.g., composing a long video from multiple text prompts.

This paper introduces a method for realistic kinetic typography that generates user-preferred animatable 'text content'. We draw on recent advances in guided video diffusion models to achieve visually-pleasing text appearances. To do this, we first construct a kinetic typography dataset, comprising about 600K videos. Our dataset is made from a variety of combinations in 584 templates designed by professional motion graphics designers and involves changing each letter's position, glyph, and size (i.e., flying, glitches, chromatic aberration, reflecting effects, etc.). Next, we propose a video diffusion model for kinetic typography. For this, there are three requirements: aesthetic appearances, motion effects, and readable letters. This paper identifies the requirements. For this, we present static and dynamic captions used as spatial and temporal guidance of a video diffusion model, respectively. The static caption describes the overall appearance of the video, such as colors, texture and glyph which represent a shape of each letter. The dynamic caption accounts for the movements of letters and backgrounds. We add one more guidance with zero convolution to determine which text content should be visible in the video. We apply the zero convolution to the text content, and impose it on the diffusion model. Lastly, our glyph loss, only minimizing a difference between the predicted word and its ground-truth, is proposed to make the prediction letters readable. Experiments show that our model generates kinetic typography videos with legible and artistic letter motions based on text prompts.

Motion control is crucial for generating expressive and compelling video content; however, most existing video generation models rely mainly on text prompts for control, which struggle to capture the nuances of dynamic actions and temporal compositions. To this end, we train a video generation model conditioned on spatio-temporally sparse or dense motion trajectories. In contrast to prior motion conditioning work, this flexible representation can encode any number of trajectories, object-specific or global scene motion, and temporally sparse motion; due to its flexibility we refer to this conditioning as motion prompts. While users may directly specify sparse trajectories, we also show how to translate high-level user requests into detailed, semi-dense motion prompts, a process we term motion prompt expansion. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach through various applications, including camera and object motion control, "interacting" with an image, motion transfer, and image editing. Our results showcase emergent behaviors, such as realistic physics, suggesting the potential of motion prompts for probing video models and interacting with future generative world models. Finally, we evaluate quantitatively, conduct a human study, and demonstrate strong performance. Video results are available on our webpage: https://motion-prompting.github.io/

We introduce AvatarBooth, a novel method for generating high-quality 3D avatars using text prompts or specific images. Unlike previous approaches that can only synthesize avatars based on simple text descriptions, our method enables the creation of personalized avatars from casually captured face or body images, while still supporting text-based model generation and editing. Our key contribution is the precise avatar generation control by using dual fine-tuned diffusion models separately for the human face and body. This enables us to capture intricate details of facial appearance, clothing, and accessories, resulting in highly realistic avatar generations. Furthermore, we introduce pose-consistent constraint to the optimization process to enhance the multi-view consistency of synthesized head images from the diffusion model and thus eliminate interference from uncontrolled human poses. In addition, we present a multi-resolution rendering strategy that facilitates coarse-to-fine supervision of 3D avatar generation, thereby enhancing the performance of the proposed system. The resulting avatar model can be further edited using additional text descriptions and driven by motion sequences. Experiments show that AvatarBooth outperforms previous text-to-3D methods in terms of rendering and geometric quality from either text prompts or specific images. Please check our project website at https://zeng-yifei.github.io/avatarbooth_page/.

In this work, we are interested in achieving both high text controllability and overall appearance consistency in the generation of personalized human characters. We propose a novel framework, named SerialGen, which is a serial generation method consisting of two stages: first, a standardization stage that standardizes reference images, and then a personalized generation stage based on the standardized reference. Furthermore, we introduce two modules aimed at enhancing the standardization process. Our experimental results validate the proposed framework's ability to produce personalized images that faithfully recover the reference image's overall appearance while accurately responding to a wide range of text prompts. Through thorough analysis, we highlight the critical contribution of the proposed serial generation method and standardization model, evidencing enhancements in appearance consistency between reference and output images and across serial outputs generated from diverse text prompts. The term "Serial" in this work carries a double meaning: it refers to the two-stage method and also underlines our ability to generate serial images with consistent appearance throughout.

Recent advancements in video generation have been remarkable, yet many existing methods struggle with issues of consistency and poor text-video alignment. Moreover, the field lacks effective techniques for text-guided video inpainting, a stark contrast to the well-explored domain of text-guided image inpainting. To this end, this paper proposes a novel text-guided video inpainting model that achieves better consistency, controllability and compatibility. Specifically, we introduce a simple but efficient motion capture module to preserve motion consistency, and design an instance-aware region selection instead of a random region selection to obtain better textual controllability, and utilize a novel strategy to inject some personalized models into our CoCoCo model and thus obtain better model compatibility. Extensive experiments show that our model can generate high-quality video clips. Meanwhile, our model shows better motion consistency, textual controllability and model compatibility. More details are shown in [cococozibojia.github.io](cococozibojia.github.io).

In this technical report, we target generating anthropomorphized personas for LLM-based characters in an online manner, including visual appearance, personality and tones, with only text descriptions. To achieve this, we first leverage the in-context learning capability of LLMs for personality generation by carefully designing a set of system prompts. We then propose two novel concepts: the mixture of voices (MoV) and the mixture of diffusers (MoD) for diverse voice and appearance generation. For MoV, we utilize the text-to-speech (TTS) algorithms with a variety of pre-defined tones and select the most matching one based on the user-provided text description automatically. For MoD, we combine the recent popular text-to-image generation techniques and talking head algorithms to streamline the process of generating talking objects. We termed the whole framework as ChatAnything. With it, users could be able to animate anything with any personas that are anthropomorphic using just a few text inputs. However, we have observed that the anthropomorphic objects produced by current generative models are often undetectable by pre-trained face landmark detectors, leading to failure of the face motion generation, even if these faces possess human-like appearances because those images are nearly seen during the training (e.g., OOD samples). To address this issue, we incorporate pixel-level guidance to infuse human face landmarks during the image generation phase. To benchmark these metrics, we have built an evaluation dataset. Based on it, we verify that the detection rate of the face landmark is significantly increased from 57.0% to 92.5% thus allowing automatic face animation based on generated speech content. The code and more results can be found at https://chatanything.github.io/.

We introduce MAGI, a hybrid video generation framework that combines masked modeling for intra-frame generation with causal modeling for next-frame generation. Our key innovation, Complete Teacher Forcing (CTF), conditions masked frames on complete observation frames rather than masked ones (namely Masked Teacher Forcing, MTF), enabling a smooth transition from token-level (patch-level) to frame-level autoregressive generation. CTF significantly outperforms MTF, achieving a +23% improvement in FVD scores on first-frame conditioned video prediction. To address issues like exposure bias, we employ targeted training strategies, setting a new benchmark in autoregressive video generation. Experiments show that MAGI can generate long, coherent video sequences exceeding 100 frames, even when trained on as few as 16 frames, highlighting its potential for scalable, high-quality video generation.

The stories and characters that captivate us as we grow up shape unique fantasy worlds, with images serving as the primary medium for visually experiencing these realms. Personalizing generative models through fine-tuning with theme-specific data has become a prevalent approach in text-to-image generation. However, unlike object customization, which focuses on learning specific objects, theme-specific generation encompasses diverse elements such as characters, scenes, and objects. Such diversity also introduces a key challenge: how to adaptively generate multi-character, multi-concept, and continuous theme-specific images (TSI). Moreover, fine-tuning approaches often come with significant computational overhead, time costs, and risks of overfitting. This paper explores a fundamental question: Can image generation models directly leverage images as contextual input, similarly to how large language models use text as context? To address this, we present T-Prompter, a novel training-free TSI method for generation. T-Prompter introduces visual prompting, a mechanism that integrates reference images into generative models, allowing users to seamlessly specify the target theme without requiring additional training. To further enhance this process, we propose a Dynamic Visual Prompting (DVP) mechanism, which iteratively optimizes visual prompts to improve the accuracy and quality of generated images. Our approach enables diverse applications, including consistent story generation, character design, realistic character generation, and style-guided image generation. Comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art personalization methods demonstrate that T-Prompter achieves significantly better results and excels in maintaining character identity preserving, style consistency and text alignment, offering a robust and flexible solution for theme-specific image generation.

Although recent text-to-video (T2V) generation methods have seen significant advancements, most of these works focus on producing short video clips of a single event with a single background (i.e., single-scene videos). Meanwhile, recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capability in generating layouts and programs to control downstream visual modules such as image generation models. This raises an important question: can we leverage the knowledge embedded in these LLMs for temporally consistent long video generation? In this paper, we propose VideoDirectorGPT, a novel framework for consistent multi-scene video generation that uses the knowledge of LLMs for video content planning and grounded video generation. Specifically, given a single text prompt, we first ask our video planner LLM (GPT-4) to expand it into a 'video plan', which involves generating the scene descriptions, the entities with their respective layouts, the background for each scene, and consistency groupings of the entities and backgrounds. Next, guided by this output from the video planner, our video generator, Layout2Vid, has explicit control over spatial layouts and can maintain temporal consistency of entities/backgrounds across scenes, while only trained with image-level annotations. Our experiments demonstrate that VideoDirectorGPT framework substantially improves layout and movement control in both single- and multi-scene video generation and can generate multi-scene videos with visual consistency across scenes, while achieving competitive performance with SOTAs in open-domain single-scene T2V generation. We also demonstrate that our framework can dynamically control the strength for layout guidance and can also generate videos with user-provided images. We hope our framework can inspire future work on better integrating the planning ability of LLMs into consistent long video generation.

With the advance of text-to-image models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and corresponding personalization techniques such as DreamBooth and LoRA, everyone can manifest their imagination into high-quality images at an affordable cost. Subsequently, there is a great demand for image animation techniques to further combine generated static images with motion dynamics. In this report, we propose a practical framework to animate most of the existing personalized text-to-image models once and for all, saving efforts in model-specific tuning. At the core of the proposed framework is to insert a newly initialized motion modeling module into the frozen text-to-image model and train it on video clips to distill reasonable motion priors. Once trained, by simply injecting this motion modeling module, all personalized versions derived from the same base T2I readily become text-driven models that produce diverse and personalized animated images. We conduct our evaluation on several public representative personalized text-to-image models across anime pictures and realistic photographs, and demonstrate that our proposed framework helps these models generate temporally smooth animation clips while preserving the domain and diversity of their outputs. Code and pre-trained weights will be publicly available at https://animatediff.github.io/ .

Significant advancements in video diffusion models have brought substantial progress to the field of text-to-video (T2V) synthesis. However, existing T2V synthesis model struggle to accurately generate complex motion dynamics, leading to a reduction in video realism. One possible solution is to collect massive data and train the model on it, but this would be extremely expensive. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we reformulate the typical T2V generation process as a search-based generation pipeline. Instead of scaling up the model training, we employ existing videos as the motion prior database. Specifically, we divide T2V generation process into two steps: (i) For a given prompt input, we search existing text-video datasets to find videos with text labels that closely match the prompt motions. We propose a tailored search algorithm that emphasizes object motion features. (ii) Retrieved videos are processed and distilled into motion priors to fine-tune a pre-trained base T2V model, followed by generating desired videos using input prompt. By utilizing the priors gleaned from the searched videos, we enhance the realism of the generated videos' motion. All operations can be finished on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU. We validate our method against state-of-the-art T2V models across diverse prompt inputs. The code will be public.

In recent years, there has been significant interest in creating 3D avatars and motions, driven by their diverse applications in areas like film-making, video games, AR/VR, and human-robot interaction. However, current efforts primarily concentrate on either generating the 3D avatar mesh alone or producing motion sequences, with integrating these two aspects proving to be a persistent challenge. Additionally, while avatar and motion generation predominantly target humans, extending these techniques to animals remains a significant challenge due to inadequate training data and methods. To bridge these gaps, our paper presents three key contributions. Firstly, we proposed a novel agent-based approach named Motion Avatar, which allows for the automatic generation of high-quality customizable human and animal avatars with motions through text queries. The method significantly advanced the progress in dynamic 3D character generation. Secondly, we introduced a LLM planner that coordinates both motion and avatar generation, which transforms a discriminative planning into a customizable Q&A fashion. Lastly, we presented an animal motion dataset named Zoo-300K, comprising approximately 300,000 text-motion pairs across 65 animal categories and its building pipeline ZooGen, which serves as a valuable resource for the community. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionAvatar/

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.

We propose Make-A-Video -- an approach for directly translating the tremendous recent progress in Text-to-Image (T2I) generation to Text-to-Video (T2V). Our intuition is simple: learn what the world looks like and how it is described from paired text-image data, and learn how the world moves from unsupervised video footage. Make-A-Video has three advantages: (1) it accelerates training of the T2V model (it does not need to learn visual and multimodal representations from scratch), (2) it does not require paired text-video data, and (3) the generated videos inherit the vastness (diversity in aesthetic, fantastical depictions, etc.) of today's image generation models. We design a simple yet effective way to build on T2I models with novel and effective spatial-temporal modules. First, we decompose the full temporal U-Net and attention tensors and approximate them in space and time. Second, we design a spatial temporal pipeline to generate high resolution and frame rate videos with a video decoder, interpolation model and two super resolution models that can enable various applications besides T2V. In all aspects, spatial and temporal resolution, faithfulness to text, and quality, Make-A-Video sets the new state-of-the-art in text-to-video generation, as determined by both qualitative and quantitative measures.

In recent years, generative artificial intelligence has achieved significant advancements in the field of image generation, spawning a variety of applications. However, video generation still faces considerable challenges in various aspects, such as controllability, video length, and richness of details, which hinder the application and popularization of this technology. In this work, we propose a controllable video generation framework, dubbed MimicMotion, which can generate high-quality videos of arbitrary length mimicking specific motion guidance. Compared with previous methods, our approach has several highlights. Firstly, we introduce confidence-aware pose guidance that ensures high frame quality and temporal smoothness. Secondly, we introduce regional loss amplification based on pose confidence, which significantly reduces image distortion. Lastly, for generating long and smooth videos, we propose a progressive latent fusion strategy. By this means, we can produce videos of arbitrary length with acceptable resource consumption. With extensive experiments and user studies, MimicMotion demonstrates significant improvements over previous approaches in various aspects. Detailed results and comparisons are available on our project page: https://tencent.github.io/MimicMotion .

Text-driven diffusion models have unlocked unprecedented abilities in image generation, whereas their video counterpart still lags behind due to the excessive training cost of temporal modeling. Besides the training burden, the generated videos also suffer from appearance inconsistency and structural flickers, especially in long video synthesis. To address these challenges, we design a training-free framework called ControlVideo to enable natural and efficient text-to-video generation. ControlVideo, adapted from ControlNet, leverages coarsely structural consistency from input motion sequences, and introduces three modules to improve video generation. Firstly, to ensure appearance coherence between frames, ControlVideo adds fully cross-frame interaction in self-attention modules. Secondly, to mitigate the flicker effect, it introduces an interleaved-frame smoother that employs frame interpolation on alternated frames. Finally, to produce long videos efficiently, it utilizes a hierarchical sampler that separately synthesizes each short clip with holistic coherency. Empowered with these modules, ControlVideo outperforms the state-of-the-arts on extensive motion-prompt pairs quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, thanks to the efficient designs, it generates both short and long videos within several minutes using one NVIDIA 2080Ti. Code is available at https://github.com/YBYBZhang/ControlVideo.

In this paper, we present StyleLipSync, a style-based personalized lip-sync video generative model that can generate identity-agnostic lip-synchronizing video from arbitrary audio. To generate a video of arbitrary identities, we leverage expressive lip prior from the semantically rich latent space of a pre-trained StyleGAN, where we can also design a video consistency with a linear transformation. In contrast to the previous lip-sync methods, we introduce pose-aware masking that dynamically locates the mask to improve the naturalness over frames by utilizing a 3D parametric mesh predictor frame by frame. Moreover, we propose a few-shot lip-sync adaptation method for an arbitrary person by introducing a sync regularizer that preserves lips-sync generalization while enhancing the person-specific visual information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model can generate accurate lip-sync videos even with the zero-shot setting and enhance characteristics of an unseen face using a few seconds of target video through the proposed adaptation method. Please refer to our project page.

Video generation has made remarkable progress in recent years, especially since the advent of the video diffusion models. Many video generation models can produce plausible synthetic videos, e.g., Stable Video Diffusion (SVD). However, most video models can only generate low frame rate videos due to the limited GPU memory as well as the difficulty of modeling a large set of frames. The training videos are always uniformly sampled at a specified interval for temporal compression. Previous methods promote the frame rate by either training a video interpolation model in pixel space as a postprocessing stage or training an interpolation model in latent space for a specific base video model. In this paper, we propose a training-free video interpolation method for generative video diffusion models, which is generalizable to different models in a plug-and-play manner. We investigate the non-linearity in the feature space of video diffusion models and transform a video model into a self-cascaded video diffusion model with incorporating the designed hidden state correction modules. The self-cascaded architecture and the correction module are proposed to retain the temporal consistency between key frames and the interpolated frames. Extensive evaluations are preformed on multiple popular video models to demonstrate the effectiveness of the propose method, especially that our training-free method is even comparable to trained interpolation models supported by huge compute resources and large-scale datasets.

We introduce animated stickers, a video diffusion model which generates an animation conditioned on a text prompt and static sticker image. Our model is built on top of the state-of-the-art Emu text-to-image model, with the addition of temporal layers to model motion. Due to the domain gap, i.e. differences in visual and motion style, a model which performed well on generating natural videos can no longer generate vivid videos when applied to stickers. To bridge this gap, we employ a two-stage finetuning pipeline: first with weakly in-domain data, followed by human-in-the-loop (HITL) strategy which we term ensemble-of-teachers. It distills the best qualities of multiple teachers into a smaller student model. We show that this strategy allows us to specifically target improvements to motion quality while maintaining the style from the static image. With inference optimizations, our model is able to generate an eight-frame video with high-quality, interesting, and relevant motion in under one second.

Customized generation has achieved significant progress in image synthesis, yet personalized video generation remains challenging due to temporal inconsistencies and quality degradation. In this paper, we introduce CustomVideoX, an innovative framework leveraging the video diffusion transformer for personalized video generation from a reference image. CustomVideoX capitalizes on pre-trained video networks by exclusively training the LoRA parameters to extract reference features, ensuring both efficiency and adaptability. To facilitate seamless interaction between the reference image and video content, we propose 3D Reference Attention, which enables direct and simultaneous engagement of reference image features with all video frames across spatial and temporal dimensions. To mitigate the excessive influence of reference image features and textual guidance on generated video content during inference, we implement the Time-Aware Reference Attention Bias (TAB) strategy, dynamically modulating reference bias over different time steps. Additionally, we introduce the Entity Region-Aware Enhancement (ERAE) module, aligning highly activated regions of key entity tokens with reference feature injection by adjusting attention bias. To thoroughly evaluate personalized video generation, we establish a new benchmark, VideoBench, comprising over 50 objects and 100 prompts for extensive assessment. Experimental results show that CustomVideoX significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of video consistency and quality.

This work aims to learn a high-quality text-to-video (T2V) generative model by leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) model as a basis. It is a highly desirable yet challenging task to simultaneously a) accomplish the synthesis of visually realistic and temporally coherent videos while b) preserving the strong creative generation nature of the pre-trained T2I model. To this end, we propose LaVie, an integrated video generation framework that operates on cascaded video latent diffusion models, comprising a base T2V model, a temporal interpolation model, and a video super-resolution model. Our key insights are two-fold: 1) We reveal that the incorporation of simple temporal self-attentions, coupled with rotary positional encoding, adequately captures the temporal correlations inherent in video data. 2) Additionally, we validate that the process of joint image-video fine-tuning plays a pivotal role in producing high-quality and creative outcomes. To enhance the performance of LaVie, we contribute a comprehensive and diverse video dataset named Vimeo25M, consisting of 25 million text-video pairs that prioritize quality, diversity, and aesthetic appeal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaVie achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of pre-trained LaVie models in various long video generation and personalized video synthesis applications.

We propose a method that can generate cinemagraphs automatically from a still landscape image using a pre-trained StyleGAN. Inspired by the success of recent unconditional video generation, we leverage a powerful pre-trained image generator to synthesize high-quality cinemagraphs. Unlike previous approaches that mainly utilize the latent space of a pre-trained StyleGAN, our approach utilizes its deep feature space for both GAN inversion and cinemagraph generation. Specifically, we propose multi-scale deep feature warping (MSDFW), which warps the intermediate features of a pre-trained StyleGAN at different resolutions. By using MSDFW, the generated cinemagraphs are of high resolution and exhibit plausible looping animation. We demonstrate the superiority of our method through user studies and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art cinemagraph generation methods and a video generation method that uses a pre-trained StyleGAN.

We extend multimodal transformers to include 3D camera motion as a conditioning signal for the task of video generation. Generative video models are becoming increasingly powerful, thus focusing research efforts on methods of controlling the output of such models. We propose to add virtual 3D camera controls to generative video methods by conditioning generated video on an encoding of three-dimensional camera movement over the course of the generated video. Results demonstrate that we are (1) able to successfully control the camera during video generation, starting from a single frame and a camera signal, and (2) we demonstrate the accuracy of the generated 3D camera paths using traditional computer vision methods.

Human video generation task has gained significant attention with the advancement of deep generative models. Generating realistic videos with human movements is challenging in nature, due to the intricacies of human body topology and sensitivity to visual artifacts. The extensively studied 2D media generation methods take advantage of massive human media datasets, but struggle with 3D-aware control; whereas 3D avatar-based approaches, while offering more freedom in control, lack photorealism and cannot be harmonized seamlessly with background scene. We propose AMG, a method that combines the 2D photorealism and 3D controllability by conditioning video diffusion models on controlled rendering of 3D avatars. We additionally introduce a novel data processing pipeline that reconstructs and renders human avatar movements from dynamic camera videos. AMG is the first method that enables multi-person diffusion video generation with precise control over camera positions, human motions, and background style. We also demonstrate through extensive evaluation that it outperforms existing human video generation methods conditioned on pose sequences or driving videos in terms of realism and adaptability.