# Animated Stickers: Bringing Stickers to Life with Video Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06088 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06088/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 31 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)
- [Common Diffusion Noise Schedules and Sample Steps are Flawed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08891/) (2023)
- [Emu: Enhancing Image Generation Models Using Photogenic Needles in a Haystack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15807/) (2023)
- [Align Your Gaussians: Text-to-4D with Dynamic 3D Gaussians and Composed Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13763/) (2023)
- [Latent Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10704/) (2020)
- [AVID: Any-Length Video Inpainting with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03816/) (2023)
- [Transformation-based Adversarial Video Prediction on Large-Scale Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04035/) (2020)
- [Bespoke Solvers for Generative Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19075/) (2023)
- [Video Generative Adversarial Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02250/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Guidance: Training-free Acceleration of Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12487/) (2023)
- [MoVideo: Motion-Aware Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11325/) (2023)
- [Sketching the Future (STF): Applying Conditional Control Techniques to Text-to-Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05845/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Efficient Video Diffusion Models: Advancements and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15911/) (2026)
- [ILDiff: Generate Transparent Animated Stickers by Implicit Layout Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20901/) (2024)
- [RDTF: Resource-efficient Dual-mask Training Framework for Multi-frame Animated Sticker Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17735/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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