# Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02700 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02700/

## Key facts

- Cited by 178 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [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)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00111/) (2023)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (2023)
- [CameraCtrl: Enabling Camera Control for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02101/) (2024)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 178)

- [Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20328/) (2025)
- [Diffusion as Shader: 3D-aware Video Diffusion for Versatile Video Generation Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03847/) (2025)
- [Go-with-the-Flow: Motion-Controllable Video Diffusion Models Using Real-Time Warped Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08331/) (2025)
- [Controllable Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16869/) (2025)
- [Aether: Geometric-Aware Unified World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18945/) (2025)
- [PointWorld: Scaling 3D World Models for In-The-Wild Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03782/) (2026)
- [Uni3C: Unifying Precisely 3D-Enhanced Camera and Human Motion Controls for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14899/) (2025)
- [MotionStream: Real-Time Video Generation with Interactive Motion Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01266/) (2025)
- [MagicMotion: Controllable Video Generation with Dense-to-Sparse Trajectory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16421/) (2025)
- [Force Prompting: Video Generation Models Can Learn and Generalize Physics-based Control Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19386/) (2025)
- [VLIPP: Towards Physically Plausible Video Generation with Vision and Language Informed Physical Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23368/) (2025)
- [FullDiT: Multi-Task Video Generative Foundation Model with Full Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19907/) (2025)
- [WonderPlay: Dynamic 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image and Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18151/) (2025)
- [Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08765/) (2025)
- [ATI: Any Trajectory Instruction for Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22944/) (2025)
- [PhysCtrl: Generative Physics for Controllable and Physics-Grounded Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20358/) (2025)
- [MultiShotMaster: A Controllable Multi-Shot Video Generation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03041/) (2025)
- [Reangle-A-Video: 4D Video Generation as Video-to-Video Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09151/) (2025)
- [Learning Video Generation for Robotic Manipulation with Collaborative Trajectory Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01943/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Evolution of Physics Cognition in Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21765/) (2025)
- [Emergent Temporal Correspondences from Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17220/) (2025)
- [VerseCrafter: Dynamic Realistic Video World Model with 4D Geometric Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05138/) (2026)
- [VidCRAFT3: Camera, Object, and Lighting Control for Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07531/) (2025)
- [Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10928/) (2025)
- [Perception-as-Control: Fine-grained Controllable Image Animation with 3D-aware Motion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05020/) (2025)
- [Generative Video Motion Editing with 3D Point Tracks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02015/) (2025)
- [RealWonder: Real-Time Physical Action-Conditioned Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05449/) (2026)
- [FlowDreamer: A RGB-D World Model with Flow-based Motion Representations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10075/) (2025)
- [MoAlign: Motion-Centric Representation Alignment for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19022/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Video Enhances Physical Fidelity in Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20822/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Motion control is crucial for generating expressive and compelling video content; however, most existing video generation models rely mainly on text prompts for control, which struggle to capture the nuances of dynamic actions and temporal compositions. To this end, we train a video generation model conditioned on spatio-temporally sparse or dense motion trajectories. In contrast to prior motion conditioning work, this flexible representation can encode any number of trajectories, object-specific or global scene motion, and temporally sparse motion; due to its flexibility we refer to this conditioning as motion prompts. While users may directly specify sparse trajectories, we also show how to translate high-level user requests into detailed, semi-dense motion prompts, a process we term motion prompt expansion. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach through various applications, including camera and object motion control, "interacting" with an image, motion transfer, and image editing. Our results showcase emergent behaviors, such as realistic physics, suggesting the potential of motion prompts for probing video models and interacting with future generative world models. Finally, we evaluate quantitatively, conduct a human study, and demonstrate strong performance. Video results are available on our webpage: https://motion-prompting.github.io/