# Understanding Object Dynamics for Interactive Image-to-Video Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11303 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11303/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Conditional Image Generation with PixelCNN Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05328/) (2016)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (2017)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [Generating Videos with Scene Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02612/) (2016)
- [Stable Architectures for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03341/) (2017)
- [Deep multi-scale video prediction beyond mean square error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05440/) (2015)
- [Softmax Splatting for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05534/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning for Physical Interaction through Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07157/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [DragNUWA: Fine-grained Control in Video Generation by Integrating Text, Image, and Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08089/) (2023)
- [Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15977/) (2024)
- [Conditional Image-to-Video Generation with Latent Flow Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13744/) (2023)
- [PhysGen: Rigid-Body Physics-Grounded Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18964/) (2024)
- [DragAnything: Motion Control for Anything using Entity Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07420/) (2024)
- [Motion-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Controllable Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14404/) (2023)
- [MOFA-Video: Controllable Image Animation via Generative Motion Field Adaptions in Frozen Image-to-Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20222/) (2024)
- [Make It Move: Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02815/) (2021)
- [AnimateAnything: Fine-Grained Open Domain Image Animation with Motion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12886/) (2023)
- [PhysGen3D: Crafting a Miniature Interactive World from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20746/) (2025)
- [Follow-Your-Click: Open-domain Regional Image Animation via Short Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08268/) (2024)
- [Controllable Animation of Fluid Elements in Still Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03051/) (2021)
- [iPOKE: Poking a Still Image for Controlled Stochastic Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02790/) (2021)
- [LeviTor: 3D Trajectory Oriented Image-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15214/) (2024)
- [Show Me What and Tell Me How: Video Synthesis via Multimodal Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02573/) (2022)
- [Exploring Optical-Flow-Guided Motion and Detection-Based Appearance for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02966/) (2022)
- [Free4D: Tuning-free 4D Scene Generation with Spatial-Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20785/) (2025)
- [StoryAgent: Customized Storytelling Video Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04925/) (2024)
- [TI2V-Zero: Zero-Shot Image Conditioning for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16306/) (2024)
- [Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10928/) (2025)
- [LaMD: Latent Motion Diffusion for Image-Conditional Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11603/) (2023)
- [Through-The-Mask: Mask-based Motion Trajectories for Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03059/) (2025)
- [Blowing in the Wind: CycleNet for Human Cinemagraphs from Still Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08639/) (2023)
- [Dance Any Beat: Blending Beats with Visuals in Dance Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09266/) (2024)
- [Cinemo: Consistent and Controllable Image Animation with Motion Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15642/) (2024)
- [Controllable Video Generation by Learning the Underlying Dynamical System with Neural ODE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05323/) (2023)
- [Learn the Force We Can: Enabling Sparse Motion Control in Multi-Object Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03988/) (2023)
- [Text-driven Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02872/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Human Evaluation Protocol for Text-to-Video Models: Enhancing Reliability,Reproducibility, and Practicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08845/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

What would be the effect of locally poking a static scene? We present an approach that learns naturally-looking global articulations caused by a local manipulation at a pixel level. Training requires only videos of moving objects but no information of the underlying manipulation of the physical scene. Our generative model learns to infer natural object dynamics as a response to user interaction and learns about the interrelations between different object body regions. Given a static image of an object and a local poking of a pixel, the approach then predicts how the object would deform over time. In contrast to existing work on video prediction, we do not synthesize arbitrary realistic videos but enable local interactive control of the deformation. Our model is not restricted to particular object categories and can transfer dynamics onto novel unseen object instances. Extensive experiments on diverse objects demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to common video prediction frameworks. Project page is available at https://bit.ly/3cxfA2L .