# Reenact Anything: Semantic Video Motion Transfer Using Motion-Textual Inversion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00458 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00458/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 79 of its 115 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03027/) (2023)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [TokenFlow: Consistent Diffusion Features for Consistent Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10373/) (2023)
- [ControlVideo: Training-free Controllable Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13077/) (2023)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [Pix2Video: Video Editing using Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12688/) (2023)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [Video-P2P: Video Editing with Cross-attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04761/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Video Motion Transfer with Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07776/) (2024)
- [Generative Video Motion Editing with 3D Point Tracks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02015/) (2025)
- [RoPECraft: Training-Free Motion Transfer with Trajectory-Guided RoPE Optimization on Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13344/) (2025)
- [Learning to Animate Images from A Few Videos to Portray Delicate Human Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00276/) (2025)
- [Gaussian See, Gaussian Do: Semantic 3D Motion Transfer from Multiview Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14848/) (2025)
- [MULTI: Disentangling Camera Lens, Sensor, View, and Domain for Novel Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12134/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have seen a tremendous improvement in the quality of video generation and editing approaches. While several techniques focus on editing appearance, few address motion. Current approaches using text, trajectories, or bounding boxes are limited to simple motions, so we specify motions with a single motion reference video instead. We further propose to use a pre-trained image-to-video model rather than a text-to-video model. This approach allows us to preserve the exact appearance and position of a target object or scene and helps disentangle appearance from motion. Our method, called motion-textual inversion, leverages our observation that image-to-video models extract appearance mainly from the (latent) image input, while the text/image embedding injected via cross-attention predominantly controls motion. We thus represent motion using text/image embedding tokens. By operating on an inflated motion-text embedding containing multiple text/image embedding tokens per frame, we achieve a high temporal motion granularity. Once optimized on the motion reference video, this embedding can be applied to various target images to generate videos with semantically similar motions. Our approach does not require spatial alignment between the motion reference video and target image, generalizes across various domains, and can be applied to various tasks such as full-body and face reenactment, as well as controlling the motion of inanimate objects and the camera. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in the semantic video motion transfer task, significantly outperforming existing methods in this context. Project website: https://mkansy.github.io/reenact-anything/