# Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17117 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/

## Key facts

- Cited by 688 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 57 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03011/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 688)

- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [CameraCtrl: Enabling Camera Control for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02101/) (2024)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [StoryDiffusion: Consistent Self-Attention for Long-Range Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01434/) (2024)
- [EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17485/) (2024)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [EchoMimic: Lifelike Audio-Driven Portrait Animations through Editable Landmark Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08136/) (2024)
- [AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17694/) (2024)
- [HQ-Edit: A High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09990/) (2024)
- [Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02700/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01900/) (2024)
- [Direct-a-Video: Customized Video Generation with User-Directed Camera Movement and Object Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03162/) (2024)
- [ControlNeXt: Powerful and Efficient Control for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06070/) (2024)
- [OOTDiffusion: Outfitting Fusion based Latent Diffusion for Controllable Virtual Try-on](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01779/) (2024)
- [Lumina-T2X: Transforming Text into Any Modality, Resolution, and Duration via Flow-based Large Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05945/) (2024)
- [OmniHuman-1: Rethinking the Scaling-Up of One-Stage Conditioned Human Animation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01061/) (2025)
- [Training-Free Consistent Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03286/) (2024)
- [ID-Animator: Zero-Shot Identity-Preserving Human Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15275/) (2024)
- [CamI2V: Camera-Controlled Image-to-Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15957/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Video Diffusion: Consistent Multi-video Generation with Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17414/) (2024)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Authentic Virtual Try-on in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05139/) (2024)
- [UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01188/) (2024)
- [Loopy: Taming Audio-Driven Portrait Avatar with Long-Term Motion Dependency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02634/) (2024)
- [Controllable Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16869/) (2025)
- [Hallo2: Long-Duration and High-Resolution Audio-Driven Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07718/) (2024)
- [VideoLCM: Video Latent Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09109/) (2023)
- [DeMamba: AI-Generated Video Detection on Million-Scale GenVideo Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19707/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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