Abstract:Physical principles are fundamental to realistic visual simulation, but remain a significant oversight in transformer-based video generation. This gap highlights a critical limitation in rendering rigid body motion, a core tenet of classical mechanics. While computer graphics and physics-based simulators can easily model such collisions using Newton formulas, modern pretrain-finetune paradigms discard the concept of object rigidity during pixel-level global denoising. Even perfectly correct mathematical constraints are treated as suboptimal solutions (i.e., conditions) during model optimization in post-training, fundamentally limiting the physical realism of generated videos. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce, for the first time, a physics-aware reinforcement learning paradigm for video generation models that enforces physical collision rules directly in high-dimensional spaces, ensuring the physics knowledge is strictly applied rather than treated as conditions. Subsequently, we extend this paradigm to a unified framework, termed Mimicry-Discovery Cycle (MDcycle), which allows substantial fine-tuning while fully preserving the model's ability to leverage physics-grounded feedback. To validate our approach, we construct new benchmark PhysRVGBench and perform extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to thoroughly assess its effectiveness.
Abstract:Character image animation is gaining significant importance across various domains, driven by the demand for robust and flexible multi-subject rendering. While existing methods excel in single-person animation, they struggle to handle arbitrary subject counts, diverse character types, and spatial misalignment between the reference image and the driving poses. We attribute these limitations to an overly rigid spatial binding that forces strict pixel-wise alignment between the pose and reference, and an inability to consistently rebind motion to intended subjects. To address these challenges, we propose CoDance, a novel Unbind-Rebind framework that enables the animation of arbitrary subject counts, types, and spatial configurations conditioned on a single, potentially misaligned pose sequence. Specifically, the Unbind module employs a novel pose shift encoder to break the rigid spatial binding between the pose and the reference by introducing stochastic perturbations to both poses and their latent features, thereby compelling the model to learn a location-agnostic motion representation. To ensure precise control and subject association, we then devise a Rebind module, leveraging semantic guidance from text prompts and spatial guidance from subject masks to direct the learned motion to intended characters. Furthermore, to facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we introduce a new multi-subject CoDanceBench. Extensive experiments on CoDanceBench and existing datasets show that CoDance achieves SOTA performance, exhibiting remarkable generalization across diverse subjects and spatial layouts. The code and weights will be open-sourced.
Abstract:Most current audio-driven facial animation research primarily focuses on generating videos with neutral emotions. While some studies have addressed the generation of facial videos driven by emotional audio, efficiently generating high-quality talking head videos that integrate both emotional expressions and style features remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose ESGaussianFace, an innovative framework for emotional and stylized audio-driven facial animation. Our approach leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct 3D scenes and render videos, ensuring efficient generation of 3D consistent results. We propose an emotion-audio-guided spatial attention method that effectively integrates emotion features with audio content features. Through emotion-guided attention, the model is able to reconstruct facial details across different emotional states more accurately. To achieve emotional and stylized deformations of the 3D Gaussian points through emotion and style features, we introduce two 3D Gaussian deformation predictors. Futhermore, we propose a multi-stage training strategy, enabling the step-by-step learning of the character's lip movements, emotional variations, and style features. Our generated results exhibit high efficiency, high quality, and 3D consistency. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in terms of lip movement accuracy, expression variation, and style feature expressiveness.




Abstract:Estimating the geometric and volumetric properties of transparent deformable liquids is challenging due to optical complexities and dynamic surface deformations induced by container movements. Autonomous robots performing precise liquid manipulation tasks, such as dispensing, aspiration, and mixing, must handle containers in ways that inevitably induce these deformations, complicating accurate liquid state assessment. Current datasets lack comprehensive physics-informed simulation data representing realistic liquid behaviors under diverse dynamic scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce Phys-Liquid, a physics-informed dataset comprising 97,200 simulation images and corresponding 3D meshes, capturing liquid dynamics across multiple laboratory scenes, lighting conditions, liquid colors, and container rotations. To validate the realism and effectiveness of Phys-Liquid, we propose a four-stage reconstruction and estimation pipeline involving liquid segmentation, multi-view mask generation, 3D mesh reconstruction, and real-world scaling. Experimental results demonstrate improved accuracy and consistency in reconstructing liquid geometry and volume, outperforming existing benchmarks. The dataset and associated validation methods facilitate future advancements in transparent liquid perception tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://dualtransparency.github.io/Phys-Liquid/.
Abstract:Talking head generation is gaining significant importance across various domains, with a growing demand for high-quality rendering. However, existing methods often suffer from identity leakage (IL) and rendering artifacts (RA), particularly in extreme cases. Through an in-depth analysis of previous approaches, we identify two key insights: (1) IL arises from identity information embedded within motion features, and (2) this identity information can be leveraged to address RA. Building on these findings, this paper introduces FixTalk, a novel framework designed to simultaneously resolve both issues for high-quality talking head generation. Firstly, we propose an Enhanced Motion Indicator (EMI) to effectively decouple identity information from motion features, mitigating the impact of IL on generated talking heads. To address RA, we introduce an Enhanced Detail Indicator (EDI), which utilizes the leaked identity information to supplement missing details, thus fixing the artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FixTalk effectively mitigates IL and RA, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Abstract:Modelling disease progression in precision medicine requires capturing complex spatio-temporal dynamics while preserving anatomical integrity. Existing methods often struggle with longitudinal dependencies and structural consistency in progressive disorders. To address these limitations, we introduce MambaControl, a novel framework that integrates selective state-space modelling with diffusion processes for high-fidelity prediction of medical image trajectories. To better capture subtle structural changes over time while maintaining anatomical consistency, MambaControl combines Mamba-based long-range modelling with graph-guided anatomical control to more effectively represent anatomical correlations. Furthermore, we introduce Fourier-enhanced spectral graph representations to capture spatial coherence and multiscale detail, enabling MambaControl to achieve state-of-the-art performance in Alzheimer's disease prediction. Quantitative and regional evaluations demonstrate improved progression prediction quality and anatomical fidelity, highlighting its potential for personalised prognosis and clinical decision support.
Abstract:Relational video customization refers to the creation of personalized videos that depict user-specified relations between two subjects, a crucial task for comprehending real-world visual content. While existing methods can personalize subject appearances and motions, they still struggle with complex relational video customization, where precise relational modeling and high generalization across subject categories are essential. The primary challenge arises from the intricate spatial arrangements, layout variations, and nuanced temporal dynamics inherent in relations; consequently, current models tend to overemphasize irrelevant visual details rather than capturing meaningful interactions. To address these challenges, we propose DreamRelation, a novel approach that personalizes relations through a small set of exemplar videos, leveraging two key components: Relational Decoupling Learning and Relational Dynamics Enhancement. First, in Relational Decoupling Learning, we disentangle relations from subject appearances using relation LoRA triplet and hybrid mask training strategy, ensuring better generalization across diverse relationships. Furthermore, we determine the optimal design of relation LoRA triplet by analyzing the distinct roles of the query, key, and value features within MM-DiT's attention mechanism, making DreamRelation the first relational video generation framework with explainable components. Second, in Relational Dynamics Enhancement, we introduce space-time relational contrastive loss, which prioritizes relational dynamics while minimizing the reliance on detailed subject appearances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamRelation outperforms state-of-the-art methods in relational video customization. Code and models will be made publicly available.




Abstract:The image-to-video (I2V) generation is conditioned on the static image, which has been enhanced recently by the motion intensity as an additional control signal. These motion-aware models are appealing to generate diverse motion patterns, yet there lacks a reliable motion estimator for training such models on large-scale video set in the wild. Traditional metrics, e.g., SSIM or optical flow, are hard to generalize to arbitrary videos, while, it is very tough for human annotators to label the abstract motion intensity neither. Furthermore, the motion intensity shall reveal both local object motion and global camera movement, which has not been studied before. This paper addresses the challenge with a new motion estimator, capable of measuring the decoupled motion intensities of objects and cameras in video. We leverage the contrastive learning on randomly paired videos and distinguish the video with greater motion intensity. Such a paradigm is friendly for annotation and easy to scale up to achieve stable performance on motion estimation. We then present a new I2V model, named MotionStone, developed with the decoupled motion estimator. Experimental results demonstrate the stability of the proposed motion estimator and the state-of-the-art performance of MotionStone on I2V generation. These advantages warrant the decoupled motion estimator to serve as a general plug-in enhancer for both data processing and video generation training.




Abstract:Text serves as the key control signal in video generation due to its narrative nature. To render text descriptions into video clips, current video diffusion models borrow features from text encoders yet struggle with limited text comprehension. The recent success of large language models (LLMs) showcases the power of decoder-only transformers, which offers three clear benefits for text-to-video (T2V) generation, namely, precise text understanding resulting from the superior scalability, imagination beyond the input text enabled by next token prediction, and flexibility to prioritize user interests through instruction tuning. Nevertheless, the feature distribution gap emerging from the two different text modeling paradigms hinders the direct use of LLMs in established T2V models. This work addresses this challenge with Mimir, an end-to-end training framework featuring a carefully tailored token fuser to harmonize the outputs from text encoders and LLMs. Such a design allows the T2V model to fully leverage learned video priors while capitalizing on the text-related capability of LLMs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of Mimir in generating high-quality videos with excellent text comprehension, especially when processing short captions and managing shifting motions. Project page: https://lucaria-academy.github.io/Mimir/




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