Daily Papers

Music is essential when editing videos, but selecting music manually is difficult and time-consuming. Thus, we seek to automatically generate background music tracks given video input. This is a challenging task since it requires music-video datasets, efficient architectures for video-to-music generation, and reasonable metrics, none of which currently exist. To close this gap, we introduce a complete recipe including dataset, benchmark model, and evaluation metric for video background music generation. We present SymMV, a video and symbolic music dataset with various musical annotations. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first video-music dataset with rich musical annotations. We also propose a benchmark video background music generation framework named V-MusProd, which utilizes music priors of chords, melody, and accompaniment along with video-music relations of semantic, color, and motion features. To address the lack of objective metrics for video-music correspondence, we design a retrieval-based metric VMCP built upon a powerful video-music representation learning model. Experiments show that with our dataset, V-MusProd outperforms the state-of-the-art method in both music quality and correspondence with videos. We believe our dataset, benchmark model, and evaluation metric will boost the development of video background music generation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/zhuole1025/SymMV.

In this work, we address the task of video background music generation. Some previous works achieve effective music generation but are unable to generate melodious music tailored to a particular video, and none of them considers the video-music rhythmic consistency. To generate the background music that matches the given video, we first establish the rhythmic relations between video and background music. In particular, we connect timing, motion speed, and motion saliency from video with beat, simu-note density, and simu-note strength from music, respectively. We then propose CMT, a Controllable Music Transformer that enables local control of the aforementioned rhythmic features and global control of the music genre and instruments. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the generated background music has achieved satisfactory compatibility with the input videos, and at the same time, impressive music quality. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wzk1015/video-bgm-generation.

Generating video background that tailors to foreground subject motion is an important problem for the movie industry and visual effects community. This task involves synthesizing background that aligns with the motion and appearance of the foreground subject, while also complies with the artist's creative intention. We introduce ActAnywhere, a generative model that automates this process which traditionally requires tedious manual efforts. Our model leverages the power of large-scale video diffusion models, and is specifically tailored for this task. ActAnywhere takes a sequence of foreground subject segmentation as input and an image that describes the desired scene as condition, to produce a coherent video with realistic foreground-background interactions while adhering to the condition frame. We train our model on a large-scale dataset of human-scene interaction videos. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our model, significantly outperforming baselines. Moreover, we show that ActAnywhere generalizes to diverse out-of-distribution samples, including non-human subjects. Please visit our project webpage at https://actanywhere.github.io.

We present SONIQUE, a model for generating background music tailored to video content. Unlike traditional video-to-music generation approaches, which rely heavily on paired audio-visual datasets, SONIQUE leverages unpaired data, combining royalty-free music and independent video sources. By utilizing large language models (LLMs) for video understanding and converting visual descriptions into musical tags, alongside a U-Net-based conditional diffusion model, SONIQUE enables customizable music generation. Users can control specific aspects of the music, such as instruments, genres, tempo, and melodies, ensuring the generated output fits their creative vision. SONIQUE is open-source, with a demo available online.

In video action recognition, shortcut static features can interfere with the learning of motion features, resulting in poor out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. The video background is clearly a source of static bias, but the video foreground, such as the clothing of the actor, can also provide static bias. In this paper, we empirically verify the existence of foreground static bias by creating test videos with conflicting signals from the static and moving portions of the video. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple yet effective technique, StillMix, to learn robust action representations. Specifically, StillMix identifies bias-inducing video frames using a 2D reference network and mixes them with videos for training, serving as effective bias suppression even when we cannot explicitly extract the source of bias within each video frame or enumerate types of bias. Finally, to precisely evaluate static bias, we synthesize two new benchmarks, SCUBA for static cues in the background, and SCUFO for static cues in the foreground. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that StillMix mitigates both types of static bias and improves video representations for downstream applications.

Video matting has broad applications, from adding interesting effects to casually captured movies to assisting video production professionals. Matting with associated effects such as shadows and reflections has also attracted increasing research activity, and methods like Omnimatte have been proposed to separate dynamic foreground objects of interest into their own layers. However, prior works represent video backgrounds as 2D image layers, limiting their capacity to express more complicated scenes, thus hindering application to real-world videos. In this paper, we propose a novel video matting method, OmnimatteRF, that combines dynamic 2D foreground layers and a 3D background model. The 2D layers preserve the details of the subjects, while the 3D background robustly reconstructs scenes in real-world videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reconstructs scenes with better quality on various videos.

Commonly used datasets for evaluating video codecs are all very high quality and not representative of video typically used in video conferencing scenarios. We present the Video Conferencing Dataset (VCD) for evaluating video codecs for real-time communication, the first such dataset focused on video conferencing. VCD includes a wide variety of camera qualities and spatial and temporal information. It includes both desktop and mobile scenarios and two types of video background processing. We report the compression efficiency of H.264, H.265, H.266, and AV1 in low-delay settings on VCD and compare it with the non-video conferencing datasets UVC, MLC-JVC, and HEVC. The results show the source quality and the scenarios have a significant effect on the compression efficiency of all the codecs. VCD enables the evaluation and tuning of codecs for this important scenario. The VCD is publicly available as an open-source dataset at https://github.com/microsoft/VCD.

This paper presents a novel framework termed Cut-and-Paste for real-word semantic video editing under the guidance of text prompt and additional reference image. While the text-driven video editing has demonstrated remarkable ability to generate highly diverse videos following given text prompts, the fine-grained semantic edits are hard to control by plain textual prompt only in terms of object details and edited region, and cumbersome long text descriptions are usually needed for the task. We therefore investigate subject-driven video editing for more precise control of both edited regions and background preservation, and fine-grained semantic generation. We achieve this goal by introducing an reference image as supplementary input to the text-driven video editing, which avoids racking your brain to come up with a cumbersome text prompt describing the detailed appearance of the object. To limit the editing area, we refer to a method of cross attention control in image editing and successfully extend it to video editing by fusing the attention map of adjacent frames, which strikes a balance between maintaining video background and spatio-temporal consistency. Compared with current methods, the whole process of our method is like ``cut" the source object to be edited and then ``paste" the target object provided by reference image. We demonstrate that our method performs favorably over prior arts for video editing under the guidance of text prompt and extra reference image, as measured by both quantitative and subjective evaluations.

Recent developments in generative diffusion models have turned many dreams into realities. For video object insertion, existing methods typically require additional information, such as a reference video or a 3D asset of the object, to generate the synthetic motion. However, inserting an object from a single reference photo into a target background video remains an uncharted area due to the lack of unseen motion information. We propose DreamInsert, which achieves Image-to-Video Object Insertion in a training-free manner for the first time. By incorporating the trajectory of the object into consideration, DreamInsert can predict the unseen object movement, fuse it harmoniously with the background video, and generate the desired video seamlessly. More significantly, DreamInsert is both simple and effective, achieving zero-shot insertion without end-to-end training or additional fine-tuning on well-designed image-video data pairs. We demonstrated the effectiveness of DreamInsert through a variety of experiments. Leveraging this capability, we present the first results for Image-to-Video object insertion in a training-free manner, paving exciting new directions for future content creation and synthesis. The code will be released soon.

Deep learning models have a risk of utilizing spurious clues to make predictions, such as recognizing actions based on the background scene. This issue can severely degrade the open-set action recognition performance when the testing samples have different scene distributions from the training samples. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel method, called Scene-debiasing Open-set Action Recognition (SOAR), which features an adversarial scene reconstruction module and an adaptive adversarial scene classification module. The former prevents the decoder from reconstructing the video background given video features, and thus helps reduce the background information in feature learning. The latter aims to confuse scene type classification given video features, with a specific emphasis on the action foreground, and helps to learn scene-invariant information. In addition, we design an experiment to quantify the scene bias. The results indicate that the current open-set action recognizers are biased toward the scene, and our proposed SOAR method better mitigates such bias. Furthermore, our extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and the ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our proposed modules.

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms designed for handling complex visual observations typically learn some sort of latent state representation, either explicitly or implicitly. Standard methods of this sort do not distinguish between functionally relevant aspects of the state and irrelevant distractors, instead aiming to represent all available information equally. We propose a modified objective for model-based RL that, in combination with mutual information maximization, allows us to learn representations and dynamics for visual model-based RL without reconstruction in a way that explicitly prioritizes functionally relevant factors. The key principle behind our design is to integrate a term inspired by variational empowerment into a state-space model based on mutual information. This term prioritizes information that is correlated with action, thus ensuring that functionally relevant factors are captured first. Furthermore, the same empowerment term also promotes faster exploration during the RL process, especially for sparse-reward tasks where the reward signal is insufficient to drive exploration in the early stages of learning. We evaluate the approach on a suite of vision-based robot control tasks with natural video backgrounds, and show that the proposed prioritized information objective outperforms state-of-the-art model based RL approaches with higher sample efficiency and episodic returns. https://sites.google.com/view/information-empowerment

A basic algorithmic task in automated video surveillance is to separate background and foreground objects. Camera tampering, noisy videos, low frame rate, etc., pose difficulties in solving the problem. A general approach that classifies the tampered frames, and performs subsequent analysis on the remaining frames after discarding the tampered ones, results in loss of information. Several robust methods based on robust principal component analysis (PCA) have been introduced to solve this problem. To date, considerable effort has been expended to develop robust PCA via Principal Component Pursuit (PCP) methods with reduced computational cost and visually appealing foreground detection. However, the convex optimizations used in these algorithms do not scale well to real-world large datasets due to large matrix inversion steps. Also, an integral component of these foreground detection algorithms is singular value decomposition which is nonrobust. In this paper, we present a new video surveillance background modelling algorithm based on a new robust singular value decomposition technique rSVDdpd which takes care of both these issues. We also demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm on a benchmark dataset and a new real-life video surveillance dataset in the presence of camera tampering. Software codes and additional illustrations are made available at the accompanying website rSVDdpd Homepage (https://subroy13.github.io/rsvddpd-home/)

Recent advancements in text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models have significantly enhanced the visual quality of the generated videos. However, even recent T2V models find it challenging to follow text descriptions accurately, especially when the prompt requires accurate control of spatial layouts or object trajectories. A recent line of research uses layout guidance for T2V models that require fine-tuning or iterative manipulation of the attention map during inference time. This significantly increases the memory requirement, making it difficult to adopt a large T2V model as a backbone. To address this, we introduce Video-MSG, a training-free Guidance method for T2V generation based on Multimodal planning and Structured noise initialization. Video-MSG consists of three steps, where in the first two steps, Video-MSG creates Video Sketch, a fine-grained spatio-temporal plan for the final video, specifying background, foreground, and object trajectories, in the form of draft video frames. In the last step, Video-MSG guides a downstream T2V diffusion model with Video Sketch through noise inversion and denoising. Notably, Video-MSG does not need fine-tuning or attention manipulation with additional memory during inference time, making it easier to adopt large T2V models. Video-MSG demonstrates its effectiveness in enhancing text alignment with multiple T2V backbones (VideoCrafter2 and CogVideoX-5B) on popular T2V generation benchmarks (T2VCompBench and VBench). We provide comprehensive ablation studies about noise inversion ratio, different background generators, background object detection, and foreground object segmentation.

Computer vision analysis of camera trap video footage is essential for wildlife conservation, as captured behaviours offer some of the earliest indicators of changes in population health. Recently, several high-impact animal behaviour datasets and methods have been introduced to encourage their use; however, the role of behaviour-correlated background information and its significant effect on out-of-distribution generalisation remain unexplored. In response, we present the PanAf-FGBG dataset, featuring 20 hours of wild chimpanzee behaviours, recorded at over 350 individual camera locations. Uniquely, it pairs every video with a chimpanzee (referred to as a foreground video) with a corresponding background video (with no chimpanzee) from the same camera location. We present two views of the dataset: one with overlapping camera locations and one with disjoint locations. This setup enables, for the first time, direct evaluation of in-distribution and out-of-distribution conditions, and for the impact of backgrounds on behaviour recognition models to be quantified. All clips come with rich behavioural annotations and metadata including unique camera IDs and detailed textual scene descriptions. Additionally, we establish several baselines and present a highly effective latent-space normalisation technique that boosts out-of-distribution performance by +5.42% mAP for convolutional and +3.75% mAP for transformer-based models. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis on the role of backgrounds in out-of-distribution behaviour recognition, including the so far unexplored impact of background durations (i.e., the count of background frames within foreground videos).

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in image generation and editing, with recent advancements enabling albedo-preserving image relighting. However, applying these models to video relighting remains challenging due to the lack of paired video relighting datasets and the high demands for output fidelity and temporal consistency, further complicated by the inherent randomness of diffusion models. To address these challenges, we introduce RelightVid, a flexible framework for video relighting that can accept background video, text prompts, or environment maps as relighting conditions. Trained on in-the-wild videos with carefully designed illumination augmentations and rendered videos under extreme dynamic lighting, RelightVid achieves arbitrary video relighting with high temporal consistency without intrinsic decomposition while preserving the illumination priors of its image backbone.

Generating human videos with realistic and controllable motions is a challenging task. While existing methods can generate visually compelling videos, they lack separate control over four key video elements: foreground subject, background video, human trajectory and action patterns. In this paper, we propose a decomposed human motion control and video generation framework that explicitly decouples motion from appearance, subject from background, and action from trajectory, enabling flexible mix-and-match composition of these elements. Concretely, we first build a ground-aware 3D world coordinate system and perform motion editing directly in the 3D space. Trajectory control is implemented by unprojecting edited 2D trajectories into 3D with focal-length calibration and coordinate transformation, followed by speed alignment and orientation adjustment; actions are supplied by a motion bank or generated via text-to-motion methods. Then, based on modern text-to-video diffusion transformer models, we inject the subject as tokens for full attention, concatenate the background along the channel dimension, and add motion (trajectory and action) control signals by addition. Such a design opens up the possibility for us to generate realistic videos of anyone doing anything anywhere. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and real-world cases demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both element-wise controllability and overall video quality.

We present the Multiview Extended Video with Activities (MEVA) dataset, a new and very-large-scale dataset for human activity recognition. Existing security datasets either focus on activity counts by aggregating public video disseminated due to its content, which typically excludes same-scene background video, or they achieve persistence by observing public areas and thus cannot control for activity content. Our dataset is over 9300 hours of untrimmed, continuous video, scripted to include diverse, simultaneous activities, along with spontaneous background activity. We have annotated 144 hours for 37 activity types, marking bounding boxes of actors and props. Our collection observed approximately 100 actors performing scripted scenarios and spontaneous background activity over a three-week period at an access-controlled venue, collecting in multiple modalities with overlapping and non-overlapping indoor and outdoor viewpoints. The resulting data includes video from 38 RGB and thermal IR cameras, 42 hours of UAV footage, as well as GPS locations for the actors. 122 hours of annotation are sequestered in support of the NIST Activity in Extended Video (ActEV) challenge; the other 22 hours of annotation and the corresponding video are available on our website, along with an additional 306 hours of ground camera data, 4.6 hours of UAV data, and 9.6 hours of GPS logs. Additional derived data includes camera models geo-registering the outdoor cameras and a dense 3D point cloud model of the outdoor scene. The data was collected with IRB oversight and approval and released under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

We introduce InVi, an approach for inserting or replacing objects within videos (referred to as inpainting) using off-the-shelf, text-to-image latent diffusion models. InVi targets controlled manipulation of objects and blending them seamlessly into a background video unlike existing video editing methods that focus on comprehensive re-styling or entire scene alterations. To achieve this goal, we tackle two key challenges. Firstly, for high quality control and blending, we employ a two-step process involving inpainting and matching. This process begins with inserting the object into a single frame using a ControlNet-based inpainting diffusion model, and then generating subsequent frames conditioned on features from an inpainted frame as an anchor to minimize the domain gap between the background and the object. Secondly, to ensure temporal coherence, we replace the diffusion model's self-attention layers with extended-attention layers. The anchor frame features serve as the keys and values for these layers, enhancing consistency across frames. Our approach removes the need for video-specific fine-tuning, presenting an efficient and adaptable solution. Experimental results demonstrate that InVi achieves realistic object insertion with consistent blending and coherence across frames, outperforming existing methods.

Measuring the acoustic characteristics of a space is often done by capturing its impulse response (IR), a representation of how a full-range stimulus sound excites it. This work generates an IR from a single image, which can then be applied to other signals using convolution, simulating the reverberant characteristics of the space shown in the image. Recording these IRs is both time-intensive and expensive, and often infeasible for inaccessible locations. We use an end-to-end neural network architecture to generate plausible audio impulse responses from single images of acoustic environments. We evaluate our method both by comparisons to ground truth data and by human expert evaluation. We demonstrate our approach by generating plausible impulse responses from diverse settings and formats including well known places, musical halls, rooms in paintings, images from animations and computer games, synthetic environments generated from text, panoramic images, and video conference backgrounds.

To address the challenging portrait video matting problem more precisely, existing works typically apply some matting priors that require additional user efforts to obtain, such as annotated trimaps or background images. In this work, we observe that instead of asking the user to explicitly provide a background image, we may recover it from the input video itself. To this end, we first propose a novel background restoration module (BRM) to recover the background image dynamically from the input video. BRM is extremely lightweight and can be easily integrated into existing matting models. By combining BRM with a recent image matting model, MODNet, we then present MODNet-V for portrait video matting. Benefited from the strong background prior provided by BRM, MODNet-V has only 1/3 of the parameters of MODNet but achieves comparable or even better performances. Our design allows MODNet-V to be trained in an end-to-end manner on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Finally, we introduce a new patch refinement module (PRM) to adapt MODNet-V for high-resolution videos while keeping MODNet-V lightweight and fast.

Due to lack of fully publicly available text-to-video models, current video editing methods tend to build on pre-trained text-to-image generation models, however, they still face grand challenges in dealing with the local editing of video with temporal information. First, although existing methods attempt to focus on local area editing by a pre-defined mask, the preservation of the outside-area background is non-ideal due to the spatially entire generation of each frame. In addition, specially providing a mask by user is an additional costly undertaking, so an autonomous masking strategy integrated into the editing process is desirable. Last but not least, image-level pretrained model hasn't learned temporal information across frames of a video which is vital for expressing the motion and dynamics. In this paper, we propose to adapt a image-level blended latent diffusion model to perform local video editing tasks. Specifically, we leverage DDIM inversion to acquire the latents as background latents instead of the randomly noised ones to better preserve the background information of the input video. We further introduce an autonomous mask manufacture mechanism derived from cross-attention maps in diffusion steps. Finally, we enhance the temporal consistency across video frames by transforming the self-attention blocks of U-Net into temporal-spatial blocks. Through extensive experiments, our proposed approach demonstrates effectiveness in different real-world video editing tasks.

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is a vital task in computer vision, focusing on distinguishing foreground objects from the background across video frames. Our work draws inspiration from the Cutie model, and we investigate the effects of object memory, the total number of memory frames, and input resolution on segmentation performance. This report validates the effectiveness of our inference method on the coMplex video Object SEgmentation (MOSE) dataset, which features complex occlusions. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a J\&F score of 0.8139 on the test set, securing the third position in the final ranking. These findings highlight the robustness and accuracy of our method in handling challenging VOS scenarios.

Video moment retrieval (VMR) identifies a specific moment in an untrimmed video for a given natural language query. This task is prone to suffer the weak alignment problem innate in video datasets. Due to the ambiguity, a query does not fully cover the relevant details of the corresponding moment, or the moment may contain misaligned and irrelevant frames, potentially limiting further performance gains. To tackle this problem, we propose a background-aware moment detection transformer (BM-DETR). Our model adopts a contrastive approach, carefully utilizing the negative queries matched to other moments in the video. Specifically, our model learns to predict the target moment from the joint probability of each frame given the positive query and the complement of negative queries. This leads to effective use of the surrounding background, improving moment sensitivity and enhancing overall alignments in videos. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/minjoong507/BM-DETR

Video relighting is a challenging yet valuable task, aiming to replace the background in videos while correspondingly adjusting the lighting in the foreground with harmonious blending. During translation, it is essential to preserve the original properties of the foreground, e.g., albedo, and propagate consistent relighting among temporal frames. In this paper, we propose Lumen, an end-to-end video relighting framework developed on large-scale video generative models, receiving flexible textual description for instructing the control of lighting and background. Considering the scarcity of high-qualified paired videos with the same foreground in various lighting conditions, we construct a large-scale dataset with a mixture of realistic and synthetic videos. For the synthetic domain, benefiting from the abundant 3D assets in the community, we leverage advanced 3D rendering engine to curate video pairs in diverse environments. For the realistic domain, we adapt a HDR-based lighting simulation to complement the lack of paired in-the-wild videos. Powered by the aforementioned dataset, we design a joint training curriculum to effectively unleash the strengths of each domain, i.e., the physical consistency in synthetic videos, and the generalized domain distribution in realistic videos. To implement this, we inject a domain-aware adapter into the model to decouple the learning of relighting and domain appearance distribution. We construct a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate Lumen together with existing methods, from the perspectives of foreground preservation and video consistency assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that Lumen effectively edit the input into cinematic relighted videos with consistent lighting and strict foreground preservation. Our project page: https://lumen-relight.github.io/

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

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have recently driven significant progress in text-to-video (T2V) generation. However, generating multiple videos with consistent characters and backgrounds remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on reference images or extensive training, and often only address character consistency, leaving background consistency to image-to-video models. We introduce BachVid, the first training-free method that achieves consistent video generation without needing any reference images. Our approach is based on a systematic analysis of DiT's attention mechanism and intermediate features, revealing its ability to extract foreground masks and identify matching points during the denoising process. Our method leverages this finding by first generating an identity video and caching the intermediate variables, and then inject these cached variables into corresponding positions in newly generated videos, ensuring both foreground and background consistency across multiple videos. Experimental results demonstrate that BachVid achieves robust consistency in generated videos without requiring additional training, offering a novel and efficient solution for consistent video generation without relying on reference images or additional training.

Unsupervised domain adaptation which aims to adapt models trained on a labeled source domain to a completely unlabeled target domain has attracted much attention in recent years. While many domain adaptation techniques have been proposed for images, the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation in videos remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we introduce Contrast and Mix (CoMix), a new contrastive learning framework that aims to learn discriminative invariant feature representations for unsupervised video domain adaptation. First, unlike existing methods that rely on adversarial learning for feature alignment, we utilize temporal contrastive learning to bridge the domain gap by maximizing the similarity between encoded representations of an unlabeled video at two different speeds as well as minimizing the similarity between different videos played at different speeds. Second, we propose a novel extension to the temporal contrastive loss by using background mixing that allows additional positives per anchor, thus adapting contrastive learning to leverage action semantics shared across both domains. Moreover, we also integrate a supervised contrastive learning objective using target pseudo-labels to enhance discriminability of the latent space for video domain adaptation. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://cvir.github.io/projects/comix

Adding proper background music helps complete a short video to be shared. Previous research tackles the task by video-to-music retrieval (V2MR), which aims to find the most suitable music track from a collection to match the content of a given query video. In practice, however, music tracks are typically much longer than the query video, necessitating (manual) trimming of the retrieved music to a shorter segment that matches the video duration. In order to bridge the gap between the practical need for music moment localization and V2MR, we propose a new task termed Music Grounding by Short Video (MGSV). To tackle the new task, we introduce a new benchmark, MGSV-EC, which comprises a diverse set of 53K short videos associated with 35k different music moments from 4k unique music tracks. Furthermore, we develop a new baseline method, MaDe, which performs both video-to-music matching and music moment detection within a unifed end-to-end deep network. Extensive experiments on MGSV-EC not only highlight the challenging nature of MGSV but also sets MaDe as a strong baseline. Data and code will be released.

Recently, diffusion-based methods have achieved great improvements in the video inpainting task. However, these methods still face many challenges, such as maintaining temporal consistency and the time-consuming issue. This paper proposes an advanced video inpainting framework using optical Flow-guided Efficient Diffusion, called FloED. Specifically, FloED employs a dual-branch architecture, where a flow branch first restores corrupted flow and a multi-scale flow adapter provides motion guidance to the main inpainting branch. Additionally, a training-free latent interpolation method is proposed to accelerate the multi-step denoising process using flow warping. Further introducing a flow attention cache mechanism, FLoED efficiently reduces the computational cost brought by incorporating optical flow. Comprehensive experiments in both background restoration and object removal tasks demonstrate that FloED outperforms state-of-the-art methods from the perspective of both performance and efficiency.

Although diffusion-based models can generate high-quality and high-resolution video sequences from textual or image inputs, they lack explicit integration of geometric cues when controlling scene lighting and visual appearance across frames. To address this limitation, we propose IllumiCraft, an end-to-end diffusion framework accepting three complementary inputs: (1) high-dynamic-range (HDR) video maps for detailed lighting control; (2) synthetically relit frames with randomized illumination changes (optionally paired with a static background reference image) to provide appearance cues; and (3) 3D point tracks that capture precise 3D geometry information. By integrating the lighting, appearance, and geometry cues within a unified diffusion architecture, IllumiCraft generates temporally coherent videos aligned with user-defined prompts. It supports background-conditioned and text-conditioned video relighting and provides better fidelity than existing controllable video generation methods. Project Page: https://yuanze-lin.me/IllumiCraft_page

We present a framework for learning to generate background music from video inputs. Unlike existing works that rely on symbolic musical annotations, which are limited in quantity and diversity, our method leverages large-scale web videos accompanied by background music. This enables our model to learn to generate realistic and diverse music. To accomplish this goal, we develop a generative video-music Transformer with a novel semantic video-music alignment scheme. Our model uses a joint autoregressive and contrastive learning objective, which encourages the generation of music aligned with high-level video content. We also introduce a novel video-beat alignment scheme to match the generated music beats with the low-level motions in the video. Lastly, to capture fine-grained visual cues in a video needed for realistic background music generation, we introduce a new temporal video encoder architecture, allowing us to efficiently process videos consisting of many densely sampled frames. We train our framework on our newly curated DISCO-MV dataset, consisting of 2.2M video-music samples, which is orders of magnitude larger than any prior datasets used for video music generation. Our method outperforms existing approaches on the DISCO-MV and MusicCaps datasets according to various music generation evaluation metrics, including human evaluation. Results are available at https://genjib.github.io/project_page/VMAs/index.html

Massive multi-modality datasets play a significant role in facilitating the success of large video-language models. However, current video-language datasets primarily provide text descriptions for visual frames, considering audio to be weakly related information. They usually overlook exploring the potential of inherent audio-visual correlation, leading to monotonous annotation within each modality instead of comprehensive and precise descriptions. Such ignorance results in the difficulty of multiple cross-modality studies. To fulfill this gap, we present MMTrail, a large-scale multi-modality video-language dataset incorporating more than 20M trailer clips with visual captions, and 2M high-quality clips with multimodal captions. Trailers preview full-length video works and integrate context, visual frames, and background music. In particular, the trailer has two main advantages: (1) the topics are diverse, and the content characters are of various types, e.g., film, news, and gaming. (2) the corresponding background music is custom-designed, making it more coherent with the visual context. Upon these insights, we propose a systemic captioning framework, achieving various modality annotations with more than 27.1k hours of trailer videos. Here, to ensure the caption retains music perspective while preserving the authority of visual context, we leverage the advanced LLM to merge all annotations adaptively. In this fashion, our MMtrail dataset potentially paves the path for fine-grained large multimodal-language model training. In experiments, we provide evaluation metrics and benchmark results on our dataset, demonstrating the high quality of our annotation and its effectiveness for model training.

We introduce a real-time, high-resolution background replacement technique which operates at 30fps in 4K resolution, and 60fps for HD on a modern GPU. Our technique is based on background matting, where an additional frame of the background is captured and used in recovering the alpha matte and the foreground layer. The main challenge is to compute a high-quality alpha matte, preserving strand-level hair details, while processing high-resolution images in real-time. To achieve this goal, we employ two neural networks; a base network computes a low-resolution result which is refined by a second network operating at high-resolution on selective patches. We introduce two largescale video and image matting datasets: VideoMatte240K and PhotoMatte13K/85. Our approach yields higher quality results compared to the previous state-of-the-art in background matting, while simultaneously yielding a dramatic boost in both speed and resolution.

Sora is a text-to-video generative AI model, released by OpenAI in February 2024. The model is trained to generate videos of realistic or imaginative scenes from text instructions and show potential in simulating the physical world. Based on public technical reports and reverse engineering, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the model's background, related technologies, applications, remaining challenges, and future directions of text-to-video AI models. We first trace Sora's development and investigate the underlying technologies used to build this "world simulator". Then, we describe in detail the applications and potential impact of Sora in multiple industries ranging from film-making and education to marketing. We discuss the main challenges and limitations that need to be addressed to widely deploy Sora, such as ensuring safe and unbiased video generation. Lastly, we discuss the future development of Sora and video generation models in general, and how advancements in the field could enable new ways of human-AI interaction, boosting productivity and creativity of video generation.

We propose IC-Effect, an instruction-guided, DiT-based framework for few-shot video VFX editing that synthesizes complex effects (\eg flames, particles and cartoon characters) while strictly preserving spatial and temporal consistency. Video VFX editing is highly challenging because injected effects must blend seamlessly with the background, the background must remain entirely unchanged, and effect patterns must be learned efficiently from limited paired data. However, existing video editing models fail to satisfy these requirements. IC-Effect leverages the source video as clean contextual conditions, exploiting the contextual learning capability of DiT models to achieve precise background preservation and natural effect injection. A two-stage training strategy, consisting of general editing adaptation followed by effect-specific learning via Effect-LoRA, ensures strong instruction following and robust effect modeling. To further improve efficiency, we introduce spatiotemporal sparse tokenization, enabling high fidelity with substantially reduced computation. We also release a paired VFX editing dataset spanning 15 high-quality visual styles. Extensive experiments show that IC-Effect delivers high-quality, controllable, and temporally consistent VFX editing, opening new possibilities for video creation.

Video editing using diffusion models has achieved remarkable results in generating high-quality edits for videos. However, current methods often rely on large-scale pretraining, limiting flexibility for specific edits. First-frame-guided editing provides control over the first frame, but lacks flexibility over subsequent frames. To address this, we propose a mask-based LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) tuning method that adapts pretrained Image-to-Video (I2V) models for flexible video editing. Our approach preserves background regions while enabling controllable edits propagation. This solution offers efficient and adaptable video editing without altering the model architecture. To better steer this process, we incorporate additional references, such as alternate viewpoints or representative scene states, which serve as visual anchors for how content should unfold. We address the control challenge using a mask-driven LoRA tuning strategy that adapts a pre-trained image-to-video model to the editing context. The model must learn from two distinct sources: the input video provides spatial structure and motion cues, while reference images offer appearance guidance. A spatial mask enables region-specific learning by dynamically modulating what the model attends to, ensuring that each area draws from the appropriate source. Experimental results show our method achieves superior video editing performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Background: We evaluate SAM 2 for surgical scene understanding by examining its semantic segmentation capabilities for organs/tissues both in zero-shot scenarios and after fine-tuning. Methods: We utilized five public datasets to evaluate and fine-tune SAM 2 for segmenting anatomical tissues in surgical videos/images. Fine-tuning was applied to the image encoder and mask decoder. We limited training subsets from 50 to 400 samples per class to better model real-world constraints with data acquisition. The impact of dataset size on fine-tuning performance was evaluated with weighted mean Dice coefficient (WMDC), and the results were also compared against previously reported state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Results: SurgiSAM 2, a fine-tuned SAM 2 model, demonstrated significant improvements in segmentation performance, achieving a 17.9% relative WMDC gain compared to the baseline SAM 2. Increasing prompt points from 1 to 10 and training data scale from 50/class to 400/class enhanced performance; the best WMDC of 0.92 on the validation subset was achieved with 10 prompt points and 400 samples per class. On the test subset, this model outperformed prior SOTA methods in 24/30 (80%) of the classes with a WMDC of 0.91 using 10-point prompts. Notably, SurgiSAM 2 generalized effectively to unseen organ classes, achieving SOTA on 7/9 (77.8%) of them. Conclusion: SAM 2 achieves remarkable zero-shot and fine-tuned performance for surgical scene segmentation, surpassing prior SOTA models across several organ classes of diverse datasets. This suggests immense potential for enabling automated/semi-automated annotation pipelines, thereby decreasing the burden of annotations facilitating several surgical applications.

The dynamic imbalance of the fore-background is a major challenge in video object counting, which is usually caused by the sparsity of target objects. This remains understudied in existing works and often leads to severe under-/over-prediction errors. To tackle this issue in video object counting, we propose a density-embedded Efficient Masked Autoencoder Counting (E-MAC) framework in this paper. To empower the model's representation ability on density regression, we develop a new Density-Embedded Masked mOdeling (DEMO) method, which first takes the density map as an auxiliary modality to perform multimodal self-representation learning for image and density map. Although DEMO contributes to effective cross-modal regression guidance, it also brings in redundant background information, making it difficult to focus on the foreground regions. To handle this dilemma, we propose an efficient spatial adaptive masking derived from density maps to boost efficiency. Meanwhile, we employ an optical flow-based temporal collaborative fusion strategy to effectively capture the dynamic variations across frames, aligning features to derive multi-frame density residuals. The counting accuracy of the current frame is boosted by harnessing the information from adjacent frames. In addition, considering that most existing datasets are limited to human-centric scenarios, we first propose a large video bird counting dataset, DroneBird, in natural scenarios for migratory bird protection. Extensive experiments on three crowd datasets and our DroneBird validate our superiority against the counterparts. The code and dataset are available.

We present Cutie, a video object segmentation (VOS) network with object-level memory reading, which puts the object representation from memory back into the video object segmentation result. Recent works on VOS employ bottom-up pixel-level memory reading which struggles due to matching noise, especially in the presence of distractors, resulting in lower performance in more challenging data. In contrast, Cutie performs top-down object-level memory reading by adapting a small set of object queries. Via those, it interacts with the bottom-up pixel features iteratively with a query-based object transformer (qt, hence Cutie). The object queries act as a high-level summary of the target object, while high-resolution feature maps are retained for accurate segmentation. Together with foreground-background masked attention, Cutie cleanly separates the semantics of the foreground object from the background. On the challenging MOSE dataset, Cutie improves by 8.7 J&F over XMem with a similar running time and improves by 4.2 J&F over DeAOT while being three times faster. Code is available at: https://hkchengrex.github.io/Cutie

Background subtraction (BGS) aims to extract all moving objects in the video frames to obtain binary foreground segmentation masks. Deep learning has been widely used in this field. Compared with supervised-based BGS methods, unsupervised methods have better generalization. However, previous unsupervised deep learning BGS algorithms perform poorly in sophisticated scenarios such as shadows or night lights, and they cannot detect objects outside the pre-defined categories. In this work, we propose an unsupervised BGS algorithm based on zero-shot object detection called Zero-shot Background Subtraction (ZBS). The proposed method fully utilizes the advantages of zero-shot object detection to build the open-vocabulary instance-level background model. Based on it, the foreground can be effectively extracted by comparing the detection results of new frames with the background model. ZBS performs well for sophisticated scenarios, and it has rich and extensible categories. Furthermore, our method can easily generalize to other tasks, such as abandoned object detection in unseen environments. We experimentally show that ZBS surpasses state-of-the-art unsupervised BGS methods by 4.70% F-Measure on the CDnet 2014 dataset. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/ZBS.

In this work, we focus on semi-supervised learning for video action detection which utilizes both labeled as well as unlabeled data. We propose a simple end-to-end consistency based approach which effectively utilizes the unlabeled data. Video action detection requires both, action class prediction as well as a spatio-temporal localization of actions. Therefore, we investigate two types of constraints, classification consistency, and spatio-temporal consistency. The presence of predominant background and static regions in a video makes it challenging to utilize spatio-temporal consistency for action detection. To address this, we propose two novel regularization constraints for spatio-temporal consistency; 1) temporal coherency, and 2) gradient smoothness. Both these aspects exploit the temporal continuity of action in videos and are found to be effective for utilizing unlabeled videos for action detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two different action detection benchmark datasets, UCF101-24 and JHMDB-21. In addition, we also show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for video object segmentation on the Youtube-VOS which demonstrates its generalization capability The proposed approach achieves competitive performance by using merely 20% of annotations on UCF101-24 when compared with recent fully supervised methods. On UCF101-24, it improves the score by +8.9% and +11% at 0.5 f-mAP and v-mAP respectively, compared to supervised approach.

Despite tremendous progress in dexterous manipulation, current visuomotor policies remain fundamentally limited by two challenges: they struggle to generalize under perceptual or behavioral distribution shifts, and their performance is constrained by the size of human demonstration data. In this paper, we use video generation as a proxy for robot policy learning to address both limitations simultaneously. We propose Video Policy, a modular framework that combines video and action generation that can be trained end-to-end. Our results demonstrate that learning to generate videos of robot behavior allows for the extraction of policies with minimal demonstration data, significantly improving robustness and sample efficiency. Our method shows strong generalization to unseen objects, backgrounds, and tasks, both in simulation and the real world. We further highlight that task success is closely tied to the generated video, with action-free video data providing critical benefits for generalizing to novel tasks. By leveraging large-scale video generative models, we achieve superior performance compared to traditional behavior cloning, paving the way for more scalable and data-efficient robot policy learning.

Subject-to-video generation has witnessed substantial progress in recent years. However, existing models still face significant challenges in faithfully following textual instructions. This limitation, commonly known as the copy-paste problem, arises from the widely used in-pair training paradigm. This approach inherently entangles subject identity with background and contextual attributes by sampling reference images from the same scene as the target video. To address this issue, we introduce Phantom-Data, the first general-purpose cross-pair subject-to-video consistency dataset, containing approximately one million identity-consistent pairs across diverse categories. Our dataset is constructed via a three-stage pipeline: (1) a general and input-aligned subject detection module, (2) large-scale cross-context subject retrieval from more than 53 million videos and 3 billion images, and (3) prior-guided identity verification to ensure visual consistency under contextual variation. Comprehensive experiments show that training with Phantom-Data significantly improves prompt alignment and visual quality while preserving identity consistency on par with in-pair baselines.

Video compositing combines live-action footage to create video production, serving as a crucial technique in video creation and film production. Traditional pipelines require intensive labor efforts and expert collaboration, resulting in lengthy production cycles and high manpower costs. To address this issue, we automate this process with generative models, called generative video compositing. This new task strives to adaptively inject identity and motion information of foreground video to the target video in an interactive manner, allowing users to customize the size, motion trajectory, and other attributes of the dynamic elements added in final video. Specifically, we designed a novel Diffusion Transformer (DiT) pipeline based on its intrinsic properties. To maintain consistency of the target video before and after editing, we revised a light-weight DiT-based background preservation branch with masked token injection. As to inherit dynamic elements from other sources, a DiT fusion block is proposed using full self-attention, along with a simple yet effective foreground augmentation for training. Besides, for fusing background and foreground videos with different layouts based on user control, we developed a novel position embedding, named Extended Rotary Position Embedding (ERoPE). Finally, we curated a dataset comprising 61K sets of videos for our new task, called VideoComp. This data includes complete dynamic elements and high-quality target videos. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively realizes generative video compositing, outperforming existing possible solutions in fidelity and consistency.

Given a video and a set of input object masks, an omnimatte method aims to decompose the video into semantically meaningful layers containing individual objects along with their associated effects, such as shadows and reflections. Existing omnimatte methods assume a static background or accurate pose and depth estimation and produce poor decompositions when these assumptions are violated. Furthermore, due to the lack of generative prior on natural videos, existing methods cannot complete dynamic occluded regions. We present a novel generative layered video decomposition framework to address the omnimatte problem. Our method does not assume a stationary scene or require camera pose or depth information and produces clean, complete layers, including convincing completions of occluded dynamic regions. Our core idea is to train a video diffusion model to identify and remove scene effects caused by a specific object. We show that this model can be finetuned from an existing video inpainting model with a small, carefully curated dataset, and demonstrate high-quality decompositions and editing results for a wide range of casually captured videos containing soft shadows, glossy reflections, splashing water, and more.

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.

We present FloVD, a novel video diffusion model for camera-controllable video generation. FloVD leverages optical flow to represent the motions of the camera and moving objects. This approach offers two key benefits. Since optical flow can be directly estimated from videos, our approach allows for the use of arbitrary training videos without ground-truth camera parameters. Moreover, as background optical flow encodes 3D correlation across different viewpoints, our method enables detailed camera control by leveraging the background motion. To synthesize natural object motion while supporting detailed camera control, our framework adopts a two-stage video synthesis pipeline consisting of optical flow generation and flow-conditioned video synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous approaches in terms of accurate camera control and natural object motion synthesis.

Diffusion models usher a new era of video editing, flexibly manipulating the video contents with text prompts. Despite the widespread application demand in editing human-centered videos, these models face significant challenges in handling complex objects like humans. In this paper, we introduce DeCo, a novel video editing framework specifically designed to treat humans and the background as separate editable targets, ensuring global spatial-temporal consistency by maintaining the coherence of each individual component. Specifically, we propose a decoupled dynamic human representation that utilizes a parametric human body prior to generate tailored humans while preserving the consistent motions as the original video. In addition, we consider the background as a layered atlas to apply text-guided image editing approaches on it. To further enhance the geometry and texture of humans during the optimization, we extend the calculation of score distillation sampling into normal space and image space. Moreover, we tackle inconsistent lighting between the edited targets by leveraging a lighting-aware video harmonizer, a problem previously overlooked in decompose-edit-combine approaches. Extensive qualitative and numerical experiments demonstrate that DeCo outperforms prior video editing methods in human-centered videos, especially in longer videos.

Despite the fact that text-to-video (TTV) model has recently achieved remarkable success, there have been few approaches on TTV for its extension to video editing. Motivated by approaches on TTV models adapting from diffusion-based text-to-image (TTI) models, we suggest the video editing framework given only a pretrained TTI model and a single <text, video> pair, which we term Edit-A-Video. The framework consists of two stages: (1) inflating the 2D model into the 3D model by appending temporal modules and tuning on the source video (2) inverting the source video into the noise and editing with target text prompt and attention map injection. Each stage enables the temporal modeling and preservation of semantic attributes of the source video. One of the key challenges for video editing include a background inconsistency problem, where the regions not included for the edit suffer from undesirable and inconsistent temporal alterations. To mitigate this issue, we also introduce a novel mask blending method, termed as sparse-causal blending (SC Blending). We improve previous mask blending methods to reflect the temporal consistency so that the area where the editing is applied exhibits smooth transition while also achieving spatio-temporal consistency of the unedited regions. We present extensive experimental results over various types of text and videos, and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to baselines in terms of background consistency, text alignment, and video editing quality.

Current state-of-the-art object detection and segmentation methods work well under the closed-world assumption. This closed-world setting assumes that the list of object categories is available during training and deployment. However, many real-world applications require detecting or segmenting novel objects, i.e., object categories never seen during training. In this paper, we present, UVO (Unidentified Video Objects), a new benchmark for open-world class-agnostic object segmentation in videos. Besides shifting the problem focus to the open-world setup, UVO is significantly larger, providing approximately 8 times more videos compared with DAVIS, and 7 times more mask (instance) annotations per video compared with YouTube-VOS and YouTube-VIS. UVO is also more challenging as it includes many videos with crowded scenes and complex background motions. We demonstrated that UVO can be used for other applications, such as object tracking and super-voxel segmentation, besides open-world object segmentation. We believe that UVo is a versatile testbed for researchers to develop novel approaches for open-world class-agnostic object segmentation, and inspires new research directions towards a more comprehensive video understanding beyond classification and detection.

Recent video depth estimation methods achieve great performance by following the paradigm of image depth estimation, i.e., typically fine-tuning pre-trained video diffusion models with massive data. However, we argue that video depth estimation is not a naive extension of image depth estimation. The temporal consistency requirements for dynamic and static regions in videos are fundamentally different. Consistent video depth in static regions, typically backgrounds, can be more effectively achieved via stereo matching across all frames, which provides much stronger global 3D cues. While the consistency for dynamic regions still should be learned from large-scale video depth data to ensure smooth transitions, due to the violation of triangulation constraints. Based on these insights, we introduce StereoDiff, a two-stage video depth estimator that synergizes stereo matching for mainly the static areas with video depth diffusion for maintaining consistent depth transitions in dynamic areas. We mathematically demonstrate how stereo matching and video depth diffusion offer complementary strengths through frequency domain analysis, highlighting the effectiveness of their synergy in capturing the advantages of both. Experimental results on zero-shot, real-world, dynamic video depth benchmarks, both indoor and outdoor, demonstrate StereoDiff's SoTA performance, showcasing its superior consistency and accuracy in video depth estimation.

Video foreground segmentation (VFS) is an important computer vision task wherein one aims to segment the objects under motion from the background. Most of the current methods are image-based, i.e., rely only on spatial cues while ignoring motion cues. Therefore, they tend to overfit the training data and don't generalize well to out-of-domain (OOD) distribution. To solve the above problem, prior works exploited several cues such as optical flow, background subtraction mask, etc. However, having a video data with annotations like optical flow is a challenging task. In this paper, we utilize the temporal information and the spatial cues from the video data to improve OOD performance. However, the challenge lies in how we model the temporal information given the video data in an interpretable way creates a very noticeable difference. We therefore devise a strategy that integrates the temporal context of the video in the development of VFS. Our approach give rise to deep learning architectures, namely MUSTAN1 and MUSTAN2 and they are based on the idea of multi-scale temporal context as an attention, i.e., aids our models to learn better representations that are beneficial for VFS. Further, we introduce a new video dataset, namely Indoor Surveillance Dataset (ISD) for VFS. It has multiple annotations on a frame level such as foreground binary mask, depth map, and instance semantic annotations. Therefore, ISD can benefit other computer vision tasks. We validate the efficacy of our architectures and compare the performance with baselines. We demonstrate that proposed methods significantly outperform the benchmark methods on OOD. In addition, the performance of MUSTAN2 is significantly improved on certain video categories on OOD data due to ISD.

We propose a novel framework for video inpainting by adopting an internal learning strategy. Unlike previous methods that use optical flow for cross-frame context propagation to inpaint unknown regions, we show that this can be achieved implicitly by fitting a convolutional neural network to known regions. Moreover, to handle challenging sequences with ambiguous backgrounds or long-term occlusion, we design two regularization terms to preserve high-frequency details and long-term temporal consistency. Extensive experiments on the DAVIS dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art inpainting quality quantitatively and qualitatively. We further extend the proposed method to another challenging task: learning to remove an object from a video giving a single object mask in only one frame in a 4K video.

Video Face Swapping (VFS) requires seamlessly injecting a source identity into a target video while meticulously preserving the original pose, expression, lighting, background, and dynamic information. Existing methods struggle to maintain identity similarity and attribute preservation while preserving temporal consistency. To address the challenge, we propose a comprehensive framework to seamlessly transfer the superiority of Image Face Swapping (IFS) to the video domain. We first introduce a novel data pipeline SyncID-Pipe that pre-trains an Identity-Anchored Video Synthesizer and combines it with IFS models to construct bidirectional ID quadruplets for explicit supervision. Building upon paired data, we propose the first Diffusion Transformer-based framework DreamID-V, employing a core Modality-Aware Conditioning module to discriminatively inject multi-model conditions. Meanwhile, we propose a Synthetic-to-Real Curriculum mechanism and an Identity-Coherence Reinforcement Learning strategy to enhance visual realism and identity consistency under challenging scenarios. To address the issue of limited benchmarks, we introduce IDBench-V, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing diverse scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate DreamID-V outperforms state-of-the-art methods and further exhibits exceptional versatility, which can be seamlessly adapted to various swap-related tasks.

We propose FairyGen, an automatic system for generating story-driven cartoon videos from a single child's drawing, while faithfully preserving its unique artistic style. Unlike previous storytelling methods that primarily focus on character consistency and basic motion, FairyGen explicitly disentangles character modeling from stylized background generation and incorporates cinematic shot design to support expressive and coherent storytelling. Given a single character sketch, we first employ an MLLM to generate a structured storyboard with shot-level descriptions that specify environment settings, character actions, and camera perspectives. To ensure visual consistency, we introduce a style propagation adapter that captures the character's visual style and applies it to the background, faithfully retaining the character's full visual identity while synthesizing style-consistent scenes. A shot design module further enhances visual diversity and cinematic quality through frame cropping and multi-view synthesis based on the storyboard. To animate the story, we reconstruct a 3D proxy of the character to derive physically plausible motion sequences, which are then used to fine-tune an MMDiT-based image-to-video diffusion model. We further propose a two-stage motion customization adapter: the first stage learns appearance features from temporally unordered frames, disentangling identity from motion; the second stage models temporal dynamics using a timestep-shift strategy with frozen identity weights. Once trained, FairyGen directly renders diverse and coherent video scenes aligned with the storyboard. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system produces animations that are stylistically faithful, narratively structured natural motion, highlighting its potential for personalized and engaging story animation. The code will be available at https://github.com/GVCLab/FairyGen

Imitation Learning has become a fundamental approach in robotic manipulation. However, collecting large-scale real-world robot demonstrations is prohibitively expensive. Simulators offer a cost-effective alternative, but the sim-to-real gap make it extremely challenging to scale. Therefore, we introduce RoboTransfer, a diffusion-based video generation framework for robotic data synthesis. Unlike previous methods, RoboTransfer integrates multi-view geometry with explicit control over scene components, such as background and object attributes. By incorporating cross-view feature interactions and global depth/normal conditions, RoboTransfer ensures geometry consistency across views. This framework allows fine-grained control, including background edits and object swaps. Experiments demonstrate that RoboTransfer is capable of generating multi-view videos with enhanced geometric consistency and visual fidelity. In addition, policies trained on the data generated by RoboTransfer achieve a 33.3% relative improvement in the success rate in the DIFF-OBJ setting and a substantial 251% relative improvement in the more challenging DIFF-ALL scenario. Explore more demos on our project page: https://horizonrobotics.github.io/robot_lab/robotransfer

Existing multimodal audio generation models often lack precise user control, which limits their applicability in professional Foley workflows. In particular, these models focus on the entire video and do not provide precise methods for prioritizing a specific object within a scene, generating unnecessary background sounds, or focusing on the wrong objects. To address this gap, we introduce the novel task of video object segmentation-aware audio generation, which explicitly conditions sound synthesis on object-level segmentation maps. We present SAGANet, a new multimodal generative model that enables controllable audio generation by leveraging visual segmentation masks along with video and textual cues. Our model provides users with fine-grained and visually localized control over audio generation. To support this task and further research on segmentation-aware Foley, we propose Segmented Music Solos, a benchmark dataset of musical instrument performance videos with segmentation information. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements over current state-of-the-art methods and sets a new standard for controllable, high-fidelity Foley synthesis. Code, samples, and Segmented Music Solos are available at https://saganet.notion.site

Video Transformers have become the prevalent solution for various video downstream tasks with superior expressive power and flexibility. However, these video transformers suffer from heavy computational costs induced by the massive number of tokens across the entire video frames, which has been the major barrier to training the model. Further, the patches irrelevant to the main contents, e.g., backgrounds, degrade the generalization performance of models. To tackle these issues, we propose training free token merging for lightweight video Transformer (vid-TLDR) that aims to enhance the efficiency of video Transformers by merging the background tokens without additional training. For vid-TLDR, we introduce a novel approach to capture the salient regions in videos only with the attention map. Further, we introduce the saliency-aware token merging strategy by dropping the background tokens and sharpening the object scores. Our experiments show that vid-TLDR significantly mitigates the computational complexity of video Transformers while achieving competitive performance compared to the base model without vid-TLDR. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/vid-TLDR.

Instruction-based editing holds vast potential due to its simple and efficient interactive editing format. However, instruction-based editing, particularly for video, has been constrained by limited training data, hindering its practical application. To this end, we introduce DreamVE, a unified model for instruction-based image and video editing. Specifically, We propose a two-stage training strategy: first image editing, then video editing. This offers two main benefits: (1) Image data scales more easily, and models are more efficient to train, providing useful priors for faster and better video editing training. (2) Unifying image and video generation is natural and aligns with current trends. Moreover, we present comprehensive training data synthesis pipelines, including collage-based and generative model-based data synthesis. The collage-based data synthesis combines foreground objects and backgrounds to generate diverse editing data, such as object manipulation, background changes, and text modifications. It can easily generate billions of accurate, consistent, realistic, and diverse editing pairs. We pretrain DreamVE on extensive collage-based data to achieve strong performance in key editing types and enhance generalization and transfer capabilities. However, collage-based data lacks some attribute editing cases, leading to a relative drop in performance. In contrast, the generative model-based pipeline, despite being hard to scale up, offers flexibility in handling attribute editing cases. Therefore, we use generative model-based data to further fine-tune DreamVE. Besides, we design an efficient and powerful editing framework for DreamVE. We build on the SOTA T2V model and use a token concatenation with early drop approach to inject source image guidance, ensuring strong consistency and editability. The codes and models will be released.

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is foundational to numerous computer vision applications, including surveillance, autonomous driving, robotics and generative video editing. However, existing VOS models often struggle with precise mask delineation, deformable objects, topologically transforming objects, tracking drift and long video sequences. In this paper, we introduce HQ-SMem, for High Quality video segmentation and tracking using Smart Memory, a novel method that enhances the performance of VOS base models by addressing these limitations. Our approach incorporates three key innovations: (i) leveraging SAM with High-Quality masks (SAM-HQ) alongside appearance-based candidate-selection to refine coarse segmentation masks, resulting in improved object boundaries; (ii) implementing a dynamic smart memory mechanism that selectively stores relevant key frames while discarding redundant ones, thereby optimizing memory usage and processing efficiency for long-term videos; and (iii) dynamically updating the appearance model to effectively handle complex topological object variations and reduce drift throughout the video. These contributions mitigate several limitations of existing VOS models including, coarse segmentations that mix-in background pixels, fixed memory update schedules, brittleness to drift and occlusions, and prompt ambiguity issues associated with SAM. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple public datasets and state-of-the-art base trackers demonstrate that our method consistently ranks among the top two on VOTS and VOTSt 2024 datasets. Moreover, HQ-SMem sets new benchmarks on Long Video Dataset and LVOS, showcasing its effectiveness in challenging scenarios characterized by complex multi-object dynamics over extended temporal durations.

In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion-based multi-condition controllable framework for video head swapping, which seamlessly transplant a human head from a static image into a dynamic video, while preserving the original body and background of target video, and further allowing to tweak head expressions and movements during swapping as needed. Existing face-swapping methods mainly focus on localized facial replacement neglecting holistic head morphology, while head-swapping approaches struggling with hairstyle diversity and complex backgrounds, and none of these methods allow users to modify the transplanted head expressions after swapping. To tackle these challenges, our method incorporates several innovative strategies through a unified latent diffusion paradigm. 1) Identity-preserving context fusion: We propose a shape-agnostic mask strategy to explicitly disentangle foreground head identity features from background/body contexts, combining hair enhancement strategy to achieve robust holistic head identity preservation across diverse hair types and complex backgrounds. 2) Expression-aware landmark retargeting and editing: We propose a disentangled 3DMM-driven retargeting module that decouples identity, expression, and head poses, minimizing the impact of original expressions in input images and supporting expression editing. While a scale-aware retargeting strategy is further employed to minimize cross-identity expression distortion for higher transfer precision. Experimental results demonstrate that our method excels in seamless background integration while preserving the identity of the source portrait, as well as showcasing superior expression transfer capabilities applicable to both real and virtual characters.

Despite raw driving videos contain richer information on facial expressions than intermediate representations such as landmarks in the field of portrait animation, they are seldom the subject of research. This is due to two challenges inherent in portrait animation driven with raw videos: 1) significant identity leakage; 2) Irrelevant background and facial details such as wrinkles degrade performance. To harnesses the power of the raw videos for vivid portrait animation, we proposed a pioneering conditional diffusion model named as MegActor. First, we introduced a synthetic data generation framework for creating videos with consistent motion and expressions but inconsistent IDs to mitigate the issue of ID leakage. Second, we segmented the foreground and background of the reference image and employed CLIP to encode the background details. This encoded information is then integrated into the network via a text embedding module, thereby ensuring the stability of the background. Finally, we further style transfer the appearance of the reference image to the driving video to eliminate the influence of facial details in the driving videos. Our final model was trained solely on public datasets, achieving results comparable to commercial models. We hope this will help the open-source community.The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/MegFaceAnimate.

This study explores the potential of open-source video conditional generation models as encoders for downstream tasks, focusing on instance segmentation using the BAIR Robot Pushing Dataset. The researchers propose using video prediction models as general visual encoders, leveraging their ability to capture critical spatial and temporal information which is essential for tasks such as instance segmentation. Inspired by human vision studies, particularly Gestalts principle of common fate, the approach aims to develop a latent space representative of motion from images to effectively discern foreground from background information. The researchers utilize a 3D Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoder 3D VQVAE video generative encoder model conditioned on an input frame, coupled with downstream segmentation tasks. Experiments involve adapting pre-trained video generative models, analyzing their latent spaces, and training custom decoders for foreground-background segmentation. The findings demonstrate promising results in leveraging generative pretext learning for downstream tasks, working towards enhanced scene analysis and segmentation in computer vision applications.

High-quality human reconstruction and photo-realistic rendering of a dynamic scene is a long-standing problem in computer vision and graphics. Despite considerable efforts invested in developing various capture systems and reconstruction algorithms, recent advancements still struggle with loose or oversized clothing and overly complex poses. In part, this is due to the challenges of acquiring high-quality human datasets. To facilitate the development of these fields, in this paper, we present PKU-DyMVHumans, a versatile human-centric dataset for high-fidelity reconstruction and rendering of dynamic human scenarios from dense multi-view videos. It comprises 8.2 million frames captured by more than 56 synchronized cameras across diverse scenarios. These sequences comprise 32 human subjects across 45 different scenarios, each with a high-detailed appearance and realistic human motion. Inspired by recent advancements in neural radiance field (NeRF)-based scene representations, we carefully set up an off-the-shelf framework that is easy to provide those state-of-the-art NeRF-based implementations and benchmark on PKU-DyMVHumans dataset. It is paving the way for various applications like fine-grained foreground/background decomposition, high-quality human reconstruction and photo-realistic novel view synthesis of a dynamic scene. Extensive studies are performed on the benchmark, demonstrating new observations and challenges that emerge from using such high-fidelity dynamic data.

Quantitative evaluation has increased dramatically among recent video inpainting work, but the video and mask content used to gauge performance has received relatively little attention. Although attributes such as camera and background scene motion inherently change the difficulty of the task and affect methods differently, existing evaluation schemes fail to control for them, thereby providing minimal insight into inpainting failure modes. To address this gap, we propose the Diagnostic Evaluation of Video Inpainting on Landscapes (DEVIL) benchmark, which consists of two contributions: (i) a novel dataset of videos and masks labeled according to several key inpainting failure modes, and (ii) an evaluation scheme that samples slices of the dataset characterized by a fixed content attribute, and scores performance on each slice according to reconstruction, realism, and temporal consistency quality. By revealing systematic changes in performance induced by particular characteristics of the input content, our challenging benchmark enables more insightful analysis into video inpainting methods and serves as an invaluable diagnostic tool for the field. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/MichiganCOG/devil .

Towards building comprehensive real-world visual perception systems, we propose and study a new problem called panoptic scene graph generation (PVSG). PVSG relates to the existing video scene graph generation (VidSGG) problem, which focuses on temporal interactions between humans and objects grounded with bounding boxes in videos. However, the limitation of bounding boxes in detecting non-rigid objects and backgrounds often causes VidSGG to miss key details crucial for comprehensive video understanding. In contrast, PVSG requires nodes in scene graphs to be grounded by more precise, pixel-level segmentation masks, which facilitate holistic scene understanding. To advance research in this new area, we contribute the PVSG dataset, which consists of 400 videos (289 third-person + 111 egocentric videos) with a total of 150K frames labeled with panoptic segmentation masks as well as fine, temporal scene graphs. We also provide a variety of baseline methods and share useful design practices for future work.

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

Understanding visual differences between dynamic scenes requires the comparative perception of compositional, spatial, and temporal changes--a capability that remains underexplored in existing vision-language systems. While prior work on Image Difference Captioning (IDC) has enabled models to describe semantic changes between static images, these approaches fail to capture motion continuity, event evolution, or editing consistency over time. We introduce the ViDiC (Video Difference Captioning) task and its corresponding ViDiC-1K dataset, designed to evaluate the ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to provide fine-grained descriptions of similarities and differences between video pairs. ViDiC-1K comprises 1,000 curated video pairs annotated with over 4,000 comparative checklist items, covering seven categories: subject, style, background, cinematography, motion, location, and playback techniques. To ensure reliable evaluation, we propose a dual-checklist framework that measures the accuracy of similarity and difference separately, based on the LLM-as-a-Judge protocol. Experiments on nineteen representative multimodal models reveal a significant performance gap in their comparative description and difference perception abilities. We hope ViDiC-1K can be a challenging benchmark that lays a solid foundation for advancing video understanding, edit awareness, and comparative reasoning in multimodal intelligence.

Omnimatte aims to decompose a given video into semantically meaningful layers, including the background and individual objects along with their associated effects, such as shadows and reflections. Existing methods often require extensive training or costly self-supervised optimization. In this paper, we present OmnimatteZero, a training-free approach that leverages off-the-shelf pre-trained video diffusion models for omnimatte. It can remove objects from videos, extract individual object layers along with their effects, and composite those objects onto new videos. We accomplish this by adapting zero-shot image inpainting techniques for video object removal, a task they fail to handle effectively out-of-the-box. We then show that self-attention maps capture information about the object and its footprints and use them to inpaint the object's effects, leaving a clean background. Additionally, through simple latent arithmetic, object layers can be isolated and recombined seamlessly with new video layers to produce new videos. Evaluations show that OmnimatteZero not only achieves superior performance in terms of background reconstruction but also sets a new record for the fastest Omnimatte approach, achieving real-time performance with minimal frame runtime.

Video inpainting, which aims to restore corrupted video content, has experienced substantial progress. Despite these advances, existing methods, whether propagating unmasked region pixels through optical flow and receptive field priors, or extending image-inpainting models temporally, face challenges in generating fully masked objects or balancing the competing objectives of background context preservation and foreground generation in one model, respectively. To address these limitations, we propose a novel dual-stream paradigm VideoPainter that incorporates an efficient context encoder (comprising only 6% of the backbone parameters) to process masked videos and inject backbone-aware background contextual cues to any pre-trained video DiT, producing semantically consistent content in a plug-and-play manner. This architectural separation significantly reduces the model's learning complexity while enabling nuanced integration of crucial background context. We also introduce a novel target region ID resampling technique that enables any-length video inpainting, greatly enhancing our practical applicability. Additionally, we establish a scalable dataset pipeline leveraging current vision understanding models, contributing VPData and VPBench to facilitate segmentation-based inpainting training and assessment, the largest video inpainting dataset and benchmark to date with over 390K diverse clips. Using inpainting as a pipeline basis, we also explore downstream applications including video editing and video editing pair data generation, demonstrating competitive performance and significant practical potential. Extensive experiments demonstrate VideoPainter's superior performance in both any-length video inpainting and editing, across eight key metrics, including video quality, mask region preservation, and textual coherence.

Humans naturally share information with those they are connected to, and video has become one of the dominant mediums for communication and expression on the Internet. To support the creation of high-quality large-scale video content, a modern pipeline requires a comprehensive understanding of both the raw input materials (e.g., the unedited footage captured by cameras) and the editing components (e.g., visual effects). In video editing scenarios, models must process multiple modalities (e.g., vision, audio, text) with strong background knowledge and handle flexible input lengths (e.g., hour-long raw videos), which poses significant challenges for traditional models. In this report, we introduce Vidi, a family of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for a wide range of video understand editing scenarios. The first release focuses on temporal retrieval, i.e., identifying the time ranges within the input videos corresponding to a given text query, which plays a critical role in intelligent editing. The model is capable of processing hour-long videos with strong temporal understanding capability, e.g., retrieve time ranges for certain queries. To support a comprehensive evaluation in real-world scenarios, we also present the VUE-TR benchmark, which introduces five key advancements. 1) Video duration: significantly longer than existing temporal retrival datasets, 2) Audio support: includes audio-based queries, 3) Query format: diverse query lengths/formats, 4) Annotation quality: ground-truth time ranges are manually annotated. 5) Evaluation metric: a refined IoU metric to support evaluation over multiple time ranges. Remarkably, Vidi significantly outperforms leading proprietary models, e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini, on the temporal retrieval task, indicating its superiority in video editing scenarios.

We present LayerFlow, a unified solution for layer-aware video generation. Given per-layer prompts, LayerFlow generates videos for the transparent foreground, clean background, and blended scene. It also supports versatile variants like decomposing a blended video or generating the background for the given foreground and vice versa. Starting from a text-to-video diffusion transformer, we organize the videos for different layers as sub-clips, and leverage layer embeddings to distinguish each clip and the corresponding layer-wise prompts. In this way, we seamlessly support the aforementioned variants in one unified framework. For the lack of high-quality layer-wise training videos, we design a multi-stage training strategy to accommodate static images with high-quality layer annotations. Specifically, we first train the model with low-quality video data. Then, we tune a motion LoRA to make the model compatible with static frames. Afterward, we train the content LoRA on the mixture of image data with high-quality layered images along with copy-pasted video data. During inference, we remove the motion LoRA thus generating smooth videos with desired layers.

We present ReDirector, a novel camera-controlled video retake generation method for dynamically captured variable-length videos. In particular, we rectify a common misuse of RoPE in previous works by aligning the spatiotemporal positions of the input video and the target retake. Moreover, we introduce Rotary Camera Encoding (RoCE), a camera-conditioned RoPE phase shift that captures and integrates multi-view relationships within and across the input and target videos. By integrating camera conditions into RoPE, our method generalizes to out-of-distribution camera trajectories and video lengths, yielding improved dynamic object localization and static background preservation. Extensive experiments further demonstrate significant improvements in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across various trajectories and lengths.

To reproduce the success of text-to-image (T2I) generation, recent works in text-to-video (T2V) generation employ large-scale text-video dataset for fine-tuning. However, such paradigm is computationally expensive. Humans have the amazing ability to learn new visual concepts from just one single exemplar. We hereby study a new T2V generation problemx2014One-Shot Video Generation, where only a single text-video pair is presented for training an open-domain T2V generator. Intuitively, we propose to adapt the T2I diffusion model pretrained on massive image data for T2V generation. We make two key observations: 1) T2I models are able to generate images that align well with the verb terms; 2) extending T2I models to generate multiple images concurrently exhibits surprisingly good content consistency. To further learn continuous motion, we propose Tune-A-Video with a tailored Sparse-Causal Attention, which generates videos from text prompts via an efficient one-shot tuning of pretrained T2I diffusion models. Tune-A-Video is capable of producing temporally-coherent videos over various applications such as change of subject or background, attribute editing, style transfer, demonstrating the versatility and effectiveness of our method.

We introduce a robust, real-time, high-resolution human video matting method that achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Our method is much lighter than previous approaches and can process 4K at 76 FPS and HD at 104 FPS on an Nvidia GTX 1080Ti GPU. Unlike most existing methods that perform video matting frame-by-frame as independent images, our method uses a recurrent architecture to exploit temporal information in videos and achieves significant improvements in temporal coherence and matting quality. Furthermore, we propose a novel training strategy that enforces our network on both matting and segmentation objectives. This significantly improves our model's robustness. Our method does not require any auxiliary inputs such as a trimap or a pre-captured background image, so it can be widely applied to existing human matting applications.

Video head swapping aims to replace the entire head of a video subject, including facial identity, head shape, and hairstyle, with that of a reference image, while preserving the target body, background, and motion dynamics. Due to the lack of ground-truth paired swapping data, prior methods typically train on cross-frame pairs of the same person within a video and rely on mask-based inpainting to mitigate identity leakage. Beyond potential boundary artifacts, this paradigm struggles to recover essential cues occluded by the mask, such as facial pose, expressions, and motion dynamics. To address these issues, we prompt a video editing model to synthesize new heads for existing videos as fake swapping inputs, while maintaining frame-synchronized facial poses and expressions. This yields HeadSwapBench, the first cross-identity paired dataset for video head swapping, which supports both training ( videos) and benchmarking ( videos) with genuine outputs. Leveraging this paired supervision, we propose DirectSwap, a mask-free, direct video head-swapping framework that extends an image U-Net into a video diffusion model with a motion module and conditioning inputs. Furthermore, we introduce the Motion- and Expression-Aware Reconstruction (MEAR) loss, which reweights the diffusion loss per pixel using frame-difference magnitudes and facial-landmark proximity, thereby enhancing cross-frame coherence in motion and expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DirectSwap achieves state-of-the-art visual quality, identity fidelity, and motion and expression consistency across diverse in-the-wild video scenes. We will release the source code and the HeadSwapBench dataset to facilitate future research.

Video matting has traditionally been limited by the lack of high-quality ground-truth data. Most existing video matting datasets provide only human-annotated imperfect alpha and foreground annotations, which must be composited to background images or videos during the training stage. Thus, the generalization capability of previous methods in real-world scenarios is typically poor. In this work, we propose to solve the problem from two perspectives. First, we emphasize the importance of large-scale pre-training by pursuing diverse synthetic and pseudo-labeled segmentation datasets. We also develop a scalable synthetic data generation pipeline that can render diverse human bodies and fine-grained hairs, yielding around 200 video clips with a 3-second duration for fine-tuning. Second, we introduce a novel video matting approach that can effectively leverage the rich priors from pre-trained video diffusion models. This architecture offers two key advantages. First, strong priors play a critical role in bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real-world scenes. Second, unlike most existing methods that process video matting frame-by-frame and use an independent decoder to aggregate temporal information, our model is inherently designed for video, ensuring strong temporal consistency. We provide a comprehensive quantitative evaluation across three benchmark datasets, demonstrating our approach's superior performance, and present comprehensive qualitative results in diverse real-world scenes, illustrating the strong generalization capability of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/GVM.

Existing camera motion-controlled video generation methods face computational bottlenecks in fine-tuning and inference. This paper proposes LightMotion, a light and tuning-free method for simulating camera motion in video generation. Operating in the latent space, it eliminates additional fine-tuning, inpainting, and depth estimation, making it more streamlined than existing methods. The endeavors of this paper comprise: (i) The latent space permutation operation effectively simulates various camera motions like panning, zooming, and rotation. (ii) The latent space resampling strategy combines background-aware sampling and cross-frame alignment to accurately fill new perspectives while maintaining coherence across frames. (iii) Our in-depth analysis shows that the permutation and resampling cause an SNR shift in latent space, leading to poor-quality generation. To address this, we propose latent space correction, which reintroduces noise during denoising to mitigate SNR shift and enhance video generation quality. Exhaustive experiments show that our LightMotion outperforms existing methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Accurate and high-fidelity driving scene reconstruction demands the effective utilization of comprehensive scene information as conditional inputs. Existing methods predominantly rely on 3D bounding boxes and BEV road maps for foreground and background control, which fail to capture the full complexity of driving scenes and adequately integrate multimodal information. In this work, we present DualDiff, a dual-branch conditional diffusion model designed to enhance driving scene generation across multiple views and video sequences. Specifically, we introduce Occupancy Ray-shape Sampling (ORS) as a conditional input, offering rich foreground and background semantics alongside 3D spatial geometry to precisely control the generation of both elements. To improve the synthesis of fine-grained foreground objects, particularly complex and distant ones, we propose a Foreground-Aware Mask (FGM) denoising loss function. Additionally, we develop the Semantic Fusion Attention (SFA) mechanism to dynamically prioritize relevant information and suppress noise, enabling more effective multimodal fusion. Finally, to ensure high-quality image-to-video generation, we introduce the Reward-Guided Diffusion (RGD) framework, which maintains global consistency and semantic coherence in generated videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DualDiff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple datasets. On the NuScenes dataset, DualDiff reduces the FID score by 4.09% compared to the best baseline. In downstream tasks, such as BEV segmentation, our method improves vehicle mIoU by 4.50% and road mIoU by 1.70%, while in BEV 3D object detection, the foreground mAP increases by 1.46%. Code will be made available at https://github.com/yangzhaojason/DualDiff.

Human video synthesis aims to create lifelike characters in various environments, with wide applications in VR, storytelling, and content creation. While 2D diffusion-based methods have made significant progress, they struggle to generalize to complex 3D poses and varying scene backgrounds. To address these limitations, we introduce CFSynthesis, a novel framework for generating high-quality human videos with customizable attributes, including identity, motion, and scene configurations. Our method leverages a texture-SMPL-based representation to ensure consistent and stable character appearances across free viewpoints. Additionally, we introduce a novel foreground-background separation strategy that effectively decomposes the scene as foreground and background, enabling seamless integration of user-defined backgrounds. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that CFSynthesis not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex human animations but also adapts effectively to 3D motions in free-view and user-specified scenarios.

Deep neural networks facilitate video question answering (VideoQA), but the real-world applications on video streams such as CCTV and live cast place higher demands on the solver. To address the challenges of VideoQA on long videos of unknown length, we define a new set of problems called Online Open-ended Video Question Answering (O^2VQA). It requires an online state-updating mechanism for the solver to decide if the collected information is sufficient to conclude an answer. We then propose a Confidence-based Event-centric Online Video Question Answering (CEO-VQA) model to solve this problem. Furthermore, a dataset called Answer Target in Background Stream (ATBS) is constructed to evaluate this newly developed online VideoQA application. Compared to the baseline VideoQA method that watches the whole video, the experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a significant performance gain.

Because of their recent introduction, self-driving cars and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) equipped vehicles have had little opportunity to learn, the dangerous traffic (including near-miss incident) scenarios that provide normal drivers with strong motivation to drive safely. Accordingly, as a means of providing learning depth, this paper presents a novel traffic database that contains information on a large number of traffic near-miss incidents that were obtained by mounting driving recorders in more than 100 taxis over the course of a decade. The study makes the following two main contributions: (i) In order to assist automated systems in detecting near-miss incidents based on database instances, we created a large-scale traffic near-miss incident database (NIDB) that consists of video clip of dangerous events captured by monocular driving recorders. (ii) To illustrate the applicability of NIDB traffic near-miss incidents, we provide two primary database-related improvements: parameter fine-tuning using various near-miss scenes from NIDB, and foreground/background separation into motion representation. Then, using our new database in conjunction with a monocular driving recorder, we developed a near-miss recognition method that provides automated systems with a performance level that is comparable to a human-level understanding of near-miss incidents (64.5% vs. 68.4% at near-miss recognition, 61.3% vs. 78.7% at near-miss detection).

Recent advances in video generation have produced vivid content that are often indistinguishable from real videos, making AI-generated video detection an emerging societal challenge. Prior AIGC detection benchmarks mostly evaluate video without audio, target broad narrative domains, and focus on classification solely. Yet it remains unclear whether state-of-the-art video generation models can produce immersive, audio-paired videos that reliably deceive humans and VLMs. To this end, we introduce Video Reality Test, an ASMR-sourced video benchmark suite for testing perceptual realism under tight audio-visual coupling, featuring the following dimensions: (i) Immersive ASMR video-audio sources. Built on carefully curated real ASMR videos, the benchmark targets fine-grained action-object interactions with diversity across objects, actions, and backgrounds. (ii) Peer-Review evaluation. An adversarial creator-reviewer protocol where video generation models act as creators aiming to fool reviewers, while VLMs serve as reviewers seeking to identify fakeness. Our experimental findings show: The best creator Veo3.1-Fast even fools most VLMs: the strongest reviewer (Gemini 2.5-Pro) achieves only 56\% accuracy (random 50\%), far below that of human experts (81.25\%). Adding audio improves real-fake discrimination, yet superficial cues such as watermarks can still significantly mislead models. These findings delineate the current boundary of video generation realism and expose limitations of VLMs in perceptual fidelity and audio-visual consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/video-reality-test/video-reality-test.

The diversity, quantity, and quality of manipulation data are critical for training effective robot policies. However, due to hardware and physical setup constraints, collecting large-scale real-world manipulation data remains difficult to scale across diverse environments. Recent work uses text-prompt conditioned image diffusion models to augment manipulation data by altering the backgrounds and tabletop objects in the visual observations. However, these approaches often overlook the practical need for multi-view and temporally coherent observations required by state-of-the-art policy models. Further, text prompts alone cannot reliably specify the scene setup. To provide the diffusion model with explicit visual guidance, we introduce visual identity prompting, which supplies exemplar images as conditioning inputs to guide the generation of the desired scene setup. To this end, we also build a scalable pipeline to curate a visual identity pool from large robotics datasets. Using our augmented manipulation data to train downstream vision-language-action and visuomotor policy models yields consistent performance gains in both simulation and real-robot settings.

Human action recognition in long-term videos, characterized by complex backgrounds and subtle action differences, poses significant challenges for traditional deep learning models due to computational overhead, difficulty in capturing long-range temporal dependencies, and limited semantic understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multi-modal understanding and reasoning, their direct application to continuous video streams for fine-grained action recognition remains an open problem. This paper introduces VT-LVLM-AR (Video-Temporal Large Vision-Language Model Adapter for Action Recognition), a novel framework designed to bridge this gap. VT-LVLM-AR comprises a Video-to-Event Mapper (VTEM) that efficiently transforms raw video into compact, semantically rich, and temporally coherent "visual event sequences" through lightweight spatio-temporal feature extraction, adaptive temporal pooling, and conceptual quantization with an event coherence bias. These visual event sequences are then fed into an LVLM-based Action Reasoning module, specifically a frozen LLaVA-1.5 model, adapted using parameter-efficient Prompt Tuning (P-Tuning v2) for action classification. Comprehensive evaluations on the NTU RGB+D and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets demonstrate that VT-LVLM-AR consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing methods (e.g., 94.1% accuracy on NTU RGB+D X-Sub). Ablation studies confirm the critical contributions of VTEM's components and the efficacy of Prompt Tuning, while human evaluations underscore the interpretability of our visual event representations. This work highlights the immense potential of leveraging LVLMs for robust and interpretable video action understanding through effective video-to-language translation and efficient model adaptation.

Today's video-conferencing tools support a rich range of professional and social activities, but their generic, grid-based environments cannot be easily adapted to meet the varying needs of distributed collaborators. To enable end-user customization, we developed BlendScape, a system for meeting participants to compose video-conferencing environments tailored to their collaboration context by leveraging AI image generation techniques. BlendScape supports flexible representations of task spaces by blending users' physical or virtual backgrounds into unified environments and implements multimodal interaction techniques to steer the generation. Through an evaluation with 15 end-users, we investigated their customization preferences for work and social scenarios. Participants could rapidly express their design intentions with BlendScape and envisioned using the system to structure collaboration in future meetings, but experienced challenges with preventing distracting elements. We implement scenarios to demonstrate BlendScape's expressiveness in supporting distributed collaboration techniques from prior work and propose composition techniques to improve the quality of environments.

We introduce a novel text-to-pose video editing method, ReimaginedAct. While existing video editing tasks are limited to changes in attributes, backgrounds, and styles, our method aims to predict open-ended human action changes in video. Moreover, our method can accept not only direct instructional text prompts but also `what if' questions to predict possible action changes. ReimaginedAct comprises video understanding, reasoning, and editing modules. First, an LLM is utilized initially to obtain a plausible answer for the instruction or question, which is then used for (1) prompting Grounded-SAM to produce bounding boxes of relevant individuals and (2) retrieving a set of pose videos that we have collected for editing human actions. The retrieved pose videos and the detected individuals are then utilized to alter the poses extracted from the original video. We also employ a timestep blending module to ensure the edited video retains its original content except where necessary modifications are needed. To facilitate research in text-to-pose video editing, we introduce a new evaluation dataset, WhatifVideo-1.0. This dataset includes videos of different scenarios spanning a range of difficulty levels, along with questions and text prompts. Experimental results demonstrate that existing video editing methods struggle with human action editing, while our approach can achieve effective action editing and even imaginary editing from counterfactual questions.

We present an algorithm, Fourier Activity Recognition (FAR), for UAV video activity recognition. Our formulation uses a novel Fourier object disentanglement method to innately separate out the human agent (which is typically small) from the background. Our disentanglement technique operates in the frequency domain to characterize the extent of temporal change of spatial pixels, and exploits convolution-multiplication properties of Fourier transform to map this representation to the corresponding object-background entangled features obtained from the network. To encapsulate contextual information and long-range space-time dependencies, we present a novel Fourier Attention algorithm, which emulates the benefits of self-attention by modeling the weighted outer product in the frequency domain. Our Fourier attention formulation uses much fewer computations than self-attention. We have evaluated our approach on multiple UAV datasets including UAV Human RGB, UAV Human Night, Drone Action, and NEC Drone. We demonstrate a relative improvement of 8.02% - 38.69% in top-1 accuracy and up to 3 times faster over prior works.

Annotating videos with object segmentation masks typically involves a two stage procedure of drawing polygons per object instance for all the frames and then linking them through time. While simple, this is a very tedious, time consuming and expensive process, making the creation of accurate annotations at scale only possible for well-funded labs. What if we were able to segment an object in the full video with only a single click? This will enable video segmentation at scale with a very low budget opening the door to many applications. Towards this goal, in this paper we propose a bottom up approach where given a single click for each object in a video, we obtain the segmentation masks of these objects in the full video. In particular, we construct a correlation volume that assigns each pixel in a target frame to either one of the objects in the reference frame or the background. We then refine this correlation volume via a recurrent attention module and decode the final segmentation. To evaluate the performance, we label the popular and challenging Cityscapes dataset with video object segmentations. Results on this new CityscapesVideo dataset show that our approach outperforms all the baselines in this challenging setting.

Recent advancements in image relighting models, driven by large-scale datasets and pre-trained diffusion models, have enabled the imposition of consistent lighting. However, video relighting still lags, primarily due to the excessive training costs and the scarcity of diverse, high-quality video relighting datasets. A simple application of image relighting models on a frame-by-frame basis leads to several issues: lighting source inconsistency and relighted appearance inconsistency, resulting in flickers in the generated videos. In this work, we propose Light-A-Video, a training-free approach to achieve temporally smooth video relighting. Adapted from image relighting models, Light-A-Video introduces two key techniques to enhance lighting consistency. First, we design a Consistent Light Attention (CLA) module, which enhances cross-frame interactions within the self-attention layers to stabilize the generation of the background lighting source. Second, leveraging the physical principle of light transport independence, we apply linear blending between the source video's appearance and the relighted appearance, using a Progressive Light Fusion (PLF) strategy to ensure smooth temporal transitions in illumination. Experiments show that Light-A-Video improves the temporal consistency of relighted video while maintaining the image quality, ensuring coherent lighting transitions across frames. Project page: https://bujiazi.github.io/light-a-video.github.io/.

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.

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.

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.

Despite the promising progress in subject-driven image generation, current models often deviate from the reference identities and struggle in complex scenes with multiple subjects. To address this challenge, we introduce OpenSubject, a video-derived large-scale corpus with 2.5M samples and 4.35M images for subject-driven generation and manipulation. The dataset is built with a four-stage pipeline that exploits cross-frame identity priors. (i) Video Curation. We apply resolution and aesthetic filtering to obtain high-quality clips. (ii) Cross-Frame Subject Mining and Pairing. We utilize vision-language model (VLM)-based category consensus, local grounding, and diversity-aware pairing to select image pairs. (iii) Identity-Preserving Reference Image Synthesis. We introduce segmentation map-guided outpainting to synthesize the input images for subject-driven generation and box-guided inpainting to generate input images for subject-driven manipulation, together with geometry-aware augmentations and irregular boundary erosion. (iv) Verification and Captioning. We utilize a VLM to validate synthesized samples, re-synthesize failed samples based on stage (iii), and then construct short and long captions. In addition, we introduce a benchmark covering subject-driven generation and manipulation, and then evaluate identity fidelity, prompt adherence, manipulation consistency, and background consistency with a VLM judge. Extensive experiments show that training with OpenSubject improves generation and manipulation performance, particularly in complex scenes.

Video personalization methods allow us to synthesize videos with specific concepts such as people, pets, and places. However, existing methods often focus on limited domains, require time-consuming optimization per subject, or support only a single subject. We present Video Alchemist - a video model with built-in multi-subject, open-set personalization capabilities for both foreground objects and background, eliminating the need for time-consuming test-time optimization. Our model is built on a new Diffusion Transformer module that fuses each conditional reference image and its corresponding subject-level text prompt with cross-attention layers. Developing such a large model presents two main challenges: dataset and evaluation. First, as paired datasets of reference images and videos are extremely hard to collect, we sample selected video frames as reference images and synthesize a clip of the target video. However, while models can easily denoise training videos given reference frames, they fail to generalize to new contexts. To mitigate this issue, we design a new automatic data construction pipeline with extensive image augmentations. Second, evaluating open-set video personalization is a challenge in itself. To address this, we introduce a personalization benchmark that focuses on accurate subject fidelity and supports diverse personalization scenarios. Finally, our extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing personalization methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Video world models aim to simulate dynamic, real-world environments, yet existing methods struggle to provide unified and precise control over camera and multi-object motion, as videos inherently operate dynamics in the projected 2D image plane. To bridge this gap, we introduce VerseCrafter, a 4D-aware video world model that enables explicit and coherent control over both camera and object dynamics within a unified 4D geometric world state. Our approach is centered on a novel 4D Geometric Control representation, which encodes the world state through a static background point cloud and per-object 3D Gaussian trajectories. This representation captures not only an object's path but also its probabilistic 3D occupancy over time, offering a flexible, category-agnostic alternative to rigid bounding boxes or parametric models. These 4D controls are rendered into conditioning signals for a pretrained video diffusion model, enabling the generation of high-fidelity, view-consistent videos that precisely adhere to the specified dynamics. Unfortunately, another major challenge lies in the scarcity of large-scale training data with explicit 4D annotations. We address this by developing an automatic data engine that extracts the required 4D controls from in-the-wild videos, allowing us to train our model on a massive and diverse dataset.

In professional video compositing workflows, artists must manually create environmental interactions-such as shadows, reflections, dust, and splashes-between foreground subjects and background layers. Existing video generative models struggle to preserve the input video while adding such effects, and current video inpainting methods either require costly per-frame masks or yield implausible results. We introduce augmented compositing, a new task that synthesizes realistic, semi-transparent environmental effects conditioned on text prompts and input video layers, while preserving the original scene. To address this task, we present Over++, a video effect generation framework that makes no assumptions about camera pose, scene stationarity, or depth supervision. We construct a paired effect dataset tailored for this task and introduce an unpaired augmentation strategy that preserves text-driven editability. Our method also supports optional mask control and keyframe guidance without requiring dense annotations. Despite training on limited data, Over++ produces diverse and realistic environmental effects and outperforms existing baselines in both effect generation and scene preservation.

Recent advances in illumination control extend image-based methods to video, yet still facing a trade-off between lighting fidelity and temporal consistency. Moving beyond relighting, a key step toward generative modeling of real-world scenes is the joint control of camera trajectory and illumination, since visual dynamics are inherently shaped by both geometry and lighting. To this end, we present Light-X, a video generation framework that enables controllable rendering from monocular videos with both viewpoint and illumination control. 1) We propose a disentangled design that decouples geometry and lighting signals: geometry and motion are captured via dynamic point clouds projected along user-defined camera trajectories, while illumination cues are provided by a relit frame consistently projected into the same geometry. These explicit, fine-grained cues enable effective disentanglement and guide high-quality illumination. 2) To address the lack of paired multi-view and multi-illumination videos, we introduce Light-Syn, a degradation-based pipeline with inverse-mapping that synthesizes training pairs from in-the-wild monocular footage. This strategy yields a dataset covering static, dynamic, and AI-generated scenes, ensuring robust training. Extensive experiments show that Light-X outperforms baseline methods in joint camera-illumination control and surpasses prior video relighting methods under both text- and background-conditioned settings.

Diffusion-based video editing have reached impressive quality and can transform either the global style, local structure, and attributes of given video inputs, following textual edit prompts. However, such solutions typically incur heavy memory and computational costs to generate temporally-coherent frames, either in the form of diffusion inversion and/or cross-frame attention. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of such inefficiencies, and suggest simple yet effective modifications that allow significant speed-ups whilst maintaining quality. Moreover, we introduce Object-Centric Diffusion, coined as OCD, to further reduce latency by allocating computations more towards foreground edited regions that are arguably more important for perceptual quality. We achieve this by two novel proposals: i) Object-Centric Sampling, decoupling the diffusion steps spent on salient regions or background, allocating most of the model capacity to the former, and ii) Object-Centric 3D Token Merging, which reduces cost of cross-frame attention by fusing redundant tokens in unimportant background regions. Both techniques are readily applicable to a given video editing model without retraining, and can drastically reduce its memory and computational cost. We evaluate our proposals on inversion-based and control-signal-based editing pipelines, and show a latency reduction up to 10x for a comparable synthesis quality.

We present Puppet-Master, an interactive video generative model that can serve as a motion prior for part-level dynamics. At test time, given a single image and a sparse set of motion trajectories (i.e., drags), Puppet-Master can synthesize a video depicting realistic part-level motion faithful to the given drag interactions. This is achieved by fine-tuning a large-scale pre-trained video diffusion model, for which we propose a new conditioning architecture to inject the dragging control effectively. More importantly, we introduce the all-to-first attention mechanism, a drop-in replacement for the widely adopted spatial attention modules, which significantly improves generation quality by addressing the appearance and background issues in existing models. Unlike other motion-conditioned video generators that are trained on in-the-wild videos and mostly move an entire object, Puppet-Master is learned from Objaverse-Animation-HQ, a new dataset of curated part-level motion clips. We propose a strategy to automatically filter out sub-optimal animations and augment the synthetic renderings with meaningful motion trajectories. Puppet-Master generalizes well to real images across various categories and outperforms existing methods in a zero-shot manner on a real-world benchmark. See our project page for more results: vgg-puppetmaster.github.io.

We present TANGO, a framework for generating co-speech body-gesture videos. Given a few-minute, single-speaker reference video and target speech audio, TANGO produces high-fidelity videos with synchronized body gestures. TANGO builds on Gesture Video Reenactment (GVR), which splits and retrieves video clips using a directed graph structure - representing video frames as nodes and valid transitions as edges. We address two key limitations of GVR: audio-motion misalignment and visual artifacts in GAN-generated transition frames. In particular, (i) we propose retrieving gestures using latent feature distance to improve cross-modal alignment. To ensure the latent features could effectively model the relationship between speech audio and gesture motion, we implement a hierarchical joint embedding space (AuMoCLIP); (ii) we introduce the diffusion-based model to generate high-quality transition frames. Our diffusion model, Appearance Consistent Interpolation (ACInterp), is built upon AnimateAnyone and includes a reference motion module and homography background flow to preserve appearance consistency between generated and reference videos. By integrating these components into the graph-based retrieval framework, TANGO reliably produces realistic, audio-synchronized videos and outperforms all existing generative and retrieval methods. Our codes and pretrained models are available: https://pantomatrix.github.io/TANGO/

We present Split-then-Merge (StM), a novel framework designed to enhance control in generative video composition and address its data scarcity problem. Unlike conventional methods relying on annotated datasets or handcrafted rules, StM splits a large corpus of unlabeled videos into dynamic foreground and background layers, then self-composes them to learn how dynamic subjects interact with diverse scenes. This process enables the model to learn the complex compositional dynamics required for realistic video generation. StM introduces a novel transformation-aware training pipeline that utilizes a multi-layer fusion and augmentation to achieve affordance-aware composition, alongside an identity-preservation loss that maintains foreground fidelity during blending. Experiments show StM outperforms SoTA methods in both quantitative benchmarks and in humans/VLLM-based qualitative evaluations. More details are available at our project page: https://split-then-merge.github.io

We present SkyReels-A1, a simple yet effective framework built upon video diffusion Transformer to facilitate portrait image animation. Existing methodologies still encounter issues, including identity distortion, background instability, and unrealistic facial dynamics, particularly in head-only animation scenarios. Besides, extending to accommodate diverse body proportions usually leads to visual inconsistencies or unnatural articulations. To address these challenges, SkyReels-A1 capitalizes on the strong generative capabilities of video DiT, enhancing facial motion transfer precision, identity retention, and temporal coherence. The system incorporates an expression-aware conditioning module that enables seamless video synthesis driven by expression-guided landmark inputs. Integrating the facial image-text alignment module strengthens the fusion of facial attributes with motion trajectories, reinforcing identity preservation. Additionally, SkyReels-A1 incorporates a multi-stage training paradigm to incrementally refine the correlation between expressions and motion while ensuring stable identity reproduction. Extensive empirical evaluations highlight the model's ability to produce visually coherent and compositionally diverse results, making it highly applicable to domains such as virtual avatars, remote communication, and digital media generation.

We present Kaleido, a subject-to-video~(S2V) generation framework, which aims to synthesize subject-consistent videos conditioned on multiple reference images of target subjects. Despite recent progress in S2V generation models, existing approaches remain inadequate at maintaining multi-subject consistency and at handling background disentanglement, often resulting in lower reference fidelity and semantic drift under multi-image conditioning. These shortcomings can be attributed to several factors. Primarily, the training dataset suffers from a lack of diversity and high-quality samples, as well as cross-paired data, i.e., paired samples whose components originate from different instances. In addition, the current mechanism for integrating multiple reference images is suboptimal, potentially resulting in the confusion of multiple subjects. To overcome these limitations, we propose a dedicated data construction pipeline, incorporating low-quality sample filtering and diverse data synthesis, to produce consistency-preserving training data. Moreover, we introduce Reference Rotary Positional Encoding (R-RoPE) to process reference images, enabling stable and precise multi-image integration. Extensive experiments across numerous benchmarks demonstrate that Kaleido significantly outperforms previous methods in consistency, fidelity, and generalization, marking an advance in S2V generation.

Numerous text-to-video (T2V) editing methods have emerged recently, but the lack of a standardized benchmark for fair evaluation has led to inconsistent claims and an inability to assess model sensitivity to hyperparameters. Fine-grained video editing is crucial for enabling precise, object-level modifications while maintaining context and temporal consistency. To address this, we introduce FiVE, a Fine-grained Video Editing Benchmark for evaluating emerging diffusion and rectified flow models. Our benchmark includes 74 real-world videos and 26 generated videos, featuring 6 fine-grained editing types, 420 object-level editing prompt pairs, and their corresponding masks. Additionally, we adapt the latest rectified flow (RF) T2V generation models, Pyramid-Flow and Wan2.1, by introducing FlowEdit, resulting in training-free and inversion-free video editing models Pyramid-Edit and Wan-Edit. We evaluate five diffusion-based and two RF-based editing methods on our FiVE benchmark using 15 metrics, covering background preservation, text-video similarity, temporal consistency, video quality, and runtime. To further enhance object-level evaluation, we introduce FiVE-Acc, a novel metric leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to assess the success of fine-grained video editing. Experimental results demonstrate that RF-based editing significantly outperforms diffusion-based methods, with Wan-Edit achieving the best overall performance and exhibiting the least sensitivity to hyperparameters. More video demo available on the anonymous website: https://sites.google.com/view/five-benchmark

Existing diffusion-based video editing models have made gorgeous advances for editing attributes of a source video over time but struggle to manipulate the motion information while preserving the original protagonist's appearance and background. To address this, we propose MotionEditor, a diffusion model for video motion editing. MotionEditor incorporates a novel content-aware motion adapter into ControlNet to capture temporal motion correspondence. While ControlNet enables direct generation based on skeleton poses, it encounters challenges when modifying the source motion in the inverted noise due to contradictory signals between the noise (source) and the condition (reference). Our adapter complements ControlNet by involving source content to transfer adapted control signals seamlessly. Further, we build up a two-branch architecture (a reconstruction branch and an editing branch) with a high-fidelity attention injection mechanism facilitating branch interaction. This mechanism enables the editing branch to query the key and value from the reconstruction branch in a decoupled manner, making the editing branch retain the original background and protagonist appearance. We also propose a skeleton alignment algorithm to address the discrepancies in pose size and position. Experiments demonstrate the promising motion editing ability of MotionEditor, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Maintaining consistent characters, props, and environments across multiple shots is a central challenge in narrative video generation. Existing models can produce high-quality short clips but often fail to preserve entity identity and appearance when scenes change or when entities reappear after long temporal gaps. We present VideoMemory, an entity-centric framework that integrates narrative planning with visual generation through a Dynamic Memory Bank. Given a structured script, a multi-agent system decomposes the narrative into shots, retrieves entity representations from memory, and synthesizes keyframes and videos conditioned on these retrieved states. The Dynamic Memory Bank stores explicit visual and semantic descriptors for characters, props, and backgrounds, and is updated after each shot to reflect story-driven changes while preserving identity. This retrieval-update mechanism enables consistent portrayal of entities across distant shots and supports coherent long-form generation. To evaluate this setting, we construct a 54-case multi-shot consistency benchmark covering character-, prop-, and background-persistent scenarios. Extensive experiments show that VideoMemory achieves strong entity-level coherence and high perceptual quality across diverse narrative sequences.

Although diffusion transformer (DiT)-based video virtual try-on (VVT) has made significant progress in synthesizing realistic videos, existing methods still struggle to capture fine-grained garment dynamics and preserve background integrity across video frames. They also incur high computational costs due to additional interaction modules introduced into DiTs, while the limited scale and quality of existing public datasets also restrict model generalization and effective training. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, KeyTailor, along with a large-scale, high-definition dataset, ViT-HD. The core idea of KeyTailor is a keyframe-driven details injection strategy, motivated by the fact that keyframes inherently contain both foreground dynamics and background consistency. Specifically, KeyTailor adopts an instruction-guided keyframe sampling strategy to filter informative frames from the input video. Subsequently,two tailored keyframe-driven modules, the garment details enhancement module and the collaborative background optimization module, are employed to distill garment dynamics into garment-related latents and to optimize the integrity of background latents, both guided by keyframes.These enriched details are then injected into standard DiT blocks together with pose, mask, and noise latents, enabling efficient and realistic try-on video synthesis. This design ensures consistency without explicitly modifying the DiT architecture, while simultaneously avoiding additional complexity. In addition, our dataset ViT-HD comprises 15, 070 high-quality video samples at a resolution of 810*1080, covering diverse garments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KeyTailor outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of garment fidelity and background integrity across both dynamic and static scenarios.

Robust perception and dynamics modeling are fundamental to real-world robotic policy learning. Recent methods employ video diffusion models (VDMs) to enhance robotic policies, improving their understanding and modeling of the physical world. However, existing approaches overlook the coherent and physically consistent motion representations inherently encoded across frames in VDMs. To this end, we propose Video2Act, a framework that efficiently guides robotic action learning by explicitly integrating spatial and motion-aware representations. Building on the inherent representations of VDMs, we extract foreground boundaries and inter-frame motion variations while filtering out background noise and task-irrelevant biases. These refined representations are then used as additional conditioning inputs to a diffusion transformer (DiT) action head, enabling it to reason about what to manipulate and how to move. To mitigate inference inefficiency, we propose an asynchronous dual-system design, where the VDM functions as the slow System 2 and the DiT head as the fast System 1, working collaboratively to generate adaptive actions. By providing motion-aware conditions to System 1, Video2Act maintains stable manipulation even with low-frequency updates from the VDM. For evaluation, Video2Act surpasses previous state-of-the-art VLA methods by 7.7% in simulation and 21.7% in real-world tasks in terms of average success rate, further exhibiting strong generalization capabilities.

Lightweight direct Time-of-Flight (dToF) sensors are ideal for 3D sensing on mobile devices. However, due to the manufacturing constraints of compact devices and the inherent physical principles of imaging, dToF depth maps are sparse and noisy. In this paper, we propose a novel video depth completion method, called SVDC, by fusing the sparse dToF data with the corresponding RGB guidance. Our method employs a multi-frame fusion scheme to mitigate the spatial ambiguity resulting from the sparse dToF imaging. Misalignment between consecutive frames during multi-frame fusion could cause blending between object edges and the background, which results in a loss of detail. To address this, we introduce an adaptive frequency selective fusion (AFSF) module, which automatically selects convolution kernel sizes to fuse multi-frame features. Our AFSF utilizes a channel-spatial enhancement attention (CSEA) module to enhance features and generates an attention map as fusion weights. The AFSF ensures edge detail recovery while suppressing high-frequency noise in smooth regions. To further enhance temporal consistency, We propose a cross-window consistency loss to ensure consistent predictions across different windows, effectively reducing flickering. Our proposed SVDC achieves optimal accuracy and consistency on the TartanAir and Dynamic Replica datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/Lan1eve/SVDC.

Object removal, as a sub-task of image inpainting, has garnered significant attention in recent years. Existing datasets related to object removal serve a valuable foundation for model validation and optimization. However, they mainly rely on inpainting techniques to generate pseudo-removed results, leading to distribution gaps between synthetic and real-world data. While some real-world datasets mitigate these issues, they face challenges such as limited scalability, high annotation costs, and unrealistic representations of lighting and shadows. To address these limitations, we propose a novel video-based annotation pipeline for constructing a realistic illumination-aware object removal dataset. Leveraging this pipeline, we introduce VDOR, a dataset specifically designed for object removal tasks, which comprises triplets of original frame images with objects, background images without objects, and corresponding masks. By leveraging continuous real-world video frames, we minimize distribution gaps and accurately capture realistic lighting and shadow variations, ensuring close alignment with real-world scenarios. Our approach significantly reduces annotation effort while providing a robust foundation for advancing object removal research.

Content creators often use music to enhance their videos, from soundtracks in movies to background music in video blogs and social media content. However, identifying the best music for a video can be a difficult and time-consuming task. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework for automatically retrieving a matching music clip for a given video, and vice versa. Our approach leverages annotated music labels, as well as the inherent artistic correspondence between visual and music elements. Distinct from previous cross-modal music retrieval works, our method combines both self-supervised and supervised training objectives. We use self-supervised and label-supervised contrastive learning to train a joint embedding space between music and video. We show the effectiveness of our approach by using music genre labels for the supervised training component, and our framework can be generalized to other music annotations (e.g., emotion, instrument, etc.). Furthermore, our method enables fine-grained control over how much the retrieval process focuses on self-supervised vs. label information at inference time. We evaluate the learned embeddings through a variety of video-to-music and music-to-video retrieval tasks. Our experiments show that the proposed approach successfully combines self-supervised and supervised objectives and is effective for controllable music-video retrieval.

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.

Modern video segmentation methods adopt object queries to perform inter-frame association and demonstrate satisfactory performance in tracking continuously appearing objects despite large-scale motion and transient occlusion. However, they all underperform on newly emerging and disappearing objects that are common in the real world because they attempt to model object emergence and disappearance through feature transitions between background and foreground queries that have significant feature gaps. We introduce Dynamic Anchor Queries (DAQ) to shorten the transition gap between the anchor and target queries by dynamically generating anchor queries based on the features of potential candidates. Furthermore, we introduce a query-level object Emergence and Disappearance Simulation (EDS) strategy, which unleashes DAQ's potential without any additional cost. Finally, we combine our proposed DAQ and EDS with DVIS to obtain DVIS-DAQ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVIS-DAQ achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on five mainstream video segmentation benchmarks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/SkyworkAI/DAQ-VS.

Unsupervised video object segmentation (VOS) is a task that aims to detect the most salient object in a video without external guidance about the object. To leverage the property that salient objects usually have distinctive movements compared to the background, recent methods collaboratively use motion cues extracted from optical flow maps with appearance cues extracted from RGB images. However, as optical flow maps are usually very relevant to segmentation masks, the network is easy to be learned overly dependent on the motion cues during network training. As a result, such two-stream approaches are vulnerable to confusing motion cues, making their prediction unstable. To relieve this issue, we design a novel motion-as-option network by treating motion cues as optional. During network training, RGB images are randomly provided to the motion encoder instead of optical flow maps, to implicitly reduce motion dependency of the network. As the learned motion encoder can deal with both RGB images and optical flow maps, two different predictions can be generated depending on which source information is used as motion input. In order to fully exploit this property, we also propose an adaptive output selection algorithm to adopt optimal prediction result at test time. Our proposed approach affords state-of-the-art performance on all public benchmark datasets, even maintaining real-time inference speed.

Recent leading zero-shot video object segmentation (ZVOS) works devote to integrating appearance and motion information by elaborately designing feature fusion modules and identically applying them in multiple feature stages. Our preliminary experiments show that with the strong long-range dependency modeling capacity of Transformer, simply concatenating the two modality features and feeding them to vanilla Transformers for feature fusion can distinctly benefit the performance but at a cost of heavy computation. Through further empirical analysis, we find that attention dependencies learned in Transformer in different stages exhibit completely different properties: global query-independent dependency in the low-level stages and semantic-specific dependency in the high-level stages. Motivated by the observations, we propose two Transformer variants: i) Context-Sharing Transformer (CST) that learns the global-shared contextual information within image frames with a lightweight computation. ii) Semantic Gathering-Scattering Transformer (SGST) that models the semantic correlation separately for the foreground and background and reduces the computation cost with a soft token merging mechanism. We apply CST and SGST for low-level and high-level feature fusions, respectively, formulating a level-isomerous Transformer framework for ZVOS task. Compared with the baseline that uses vanilla Transformers for multi-stage fusion, ours significantly increase the speed by 13 times and achieves new state-of-the-art ZVOS performance. Code is available at https://github.com/DLUT-yyc/Isomer.

In this work, we propose MagicDance, a diffusion-based model for 2D human motion and facial expression transfer on challenging human dance videos. Specifically, we aim to generate human dance videos of any target identity driven by novel pose sequences while keeping the identity unchanged. To this end, we propose a two-stage training strategy to disentangle human motions and appearance (e.g., facial expressions, skin tone and dressing), consisting of the pretraining of an appearance-control block and fine-tuning of an appearance-pose-joint-control block over human dance poses of the same dataset. Our novel design enables robust appearance control with temporally consistent upper body, facial attributes, and even background. The model also generalizes well on unseen human identities and complex motion sequences without the need for any fine-tuning with additional data with diverse human attributes by leveraging the prior knowledge of image diffusion models. Moreover, the proposed model is easy to use and can be considered as a plug-in module/extension to Stable Diffusion. We also demonstrate the model's ability for zero-shot 2D animation generation, enabling not only the appearance transfer from one identity to another but also allowing for cartoon-like stylization given only pose inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior performance on the TikTok dataset.

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/.

Video try-on stands as a promising area for its tremendous real-world potential. Prior works are limited to transferring product clothing images onto person videos with simple poses and backgrounds, while underperforming on casually captured videos. Recently, Sora revealed the scalability of Diffusion Transformer (DiT) in generating lifelike videos featuring real-world scenarios. Inspired by this, we explore and propose the first DiT-based video try-on framework for practical in-the-wild applications, named VITON-DiT. Specifically, VITON-DiT consists of a garment extractor, a Spatial-Temporal denoising DiT, and an identity preservation ControlNet. To faithfully recover the clothing details, the extracted garment features are fused with the self-attention outputs of the denoising DiT and the ControlNet. We also introduce novel random selection strategies during training and an Interpolated Auto-Regressive (IAR) technique at inference to facilitate long video generation. Unlike existing attempts that require the laborious and restrictive construction of a paired training dataset, severely limiting their scalability, VITON-DiT alleviates this by relying solely on unpaired human dance videos and a carefully designed multi-stage training strategy. Furthermore, we curate a challenging benchmark dataset to evaluate the performance of casual video try-on. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of VITON-DiT in generating spatio-temporal consistent try-on results for in-the-wild videos with complicated human poses.

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