# Through-The-Mask: Mask-based Motion Trajectories for Image-to-Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03059 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03059/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08797/) (2023)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [VideoCrafter2: Overcoming Data Limitations for High-Quality Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09047/) (2024)
- [Latte: Latent Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03048/) (2024)
- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [Latent Video Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13221/) (2022)
- [I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04145/) (2023)
- [Common Diffusion Noise Schedules and Sample Steps are Flawed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08891/) (2023)
- [Preserve Your Own Correlation: A Noise Prior for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10474/) (2023)
- [Rectified Flow: A Marginal Preserving Approach to Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14577/) (2022)
- [Emu: Enhancing Image Generation Models Using Photogenic Needles in a Haystack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15807/) (2023)
- [Emu Video: Factorizing Text-to-Video Generation by Explicit Image Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10709/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Controllable Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16869/) (2025)
- [MagicMotion: Controllable Video Generation with Dense-to-Sparse Trajectory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16421/) (2025)
- [O-DisCo-Edit: Object Distortion Control for Unified Realistic Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01596/) (2025)
- [Mask2IV: Interaction-Centric Video Generation via Mask Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03135/) (2025)
- [PISCO: Precise Video Instance Insertion with Sparse Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08277/) (2026)
- [MAD: Motion Appearance Decoupling for efficient Driving World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09452/) (2026)
- [Let it Snow! Animating 3D Gaussian Scenes with Dynamic Weather Effects via Physics-Guided Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05296/) (2025)
- [UnityVideo: Unified Multi-Modal Multi-Task Learning for Enhancing World-Aware Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07831/) (2025)
- [The World is Your Canvas: Painting Promptable Events with Reference Images, Trajectories, and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16924/) (2025)
- [Evolution of Video Generative Foundations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06339/) (2026)
- [Open-world Hand-Object Interaction Video Generation Based on Structure and Contact-aware Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01677/) (2025)
- [FlashMotion: Few-Step Controllable Video Generation with Trajectory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12146/) (2026)
- [VHOI: Controllable Video Generation of Human-Object Interactions from Sparse Trajectories via Motion Densification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09646/) (2025)
- [Consistent and Controllable Image Animation with Motion Linear Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07246/) (2025)
- [Latent Temporal Discrepancy as Motion Prior: A Loss-Weighting Strategy for Dynamic Fidelity in T2V](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20504/) (2026)
- [EasyVFX: Frequency-Driven Decoupling for Resource-Efficient VFX Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22051/) (2026)
- [Temporal State Transport in Video Generation: Diagnosing and Correcting Spectral Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08505/) (2026)
- [Few-Shot-Based Modular Image-to-Video Adapter for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20000/) (2025)
- [Search2Motion: Training-Free Object-Level Motion Control via Attention-Consensus Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16711/) (2026)
- [LIFT: Layout-In-Future Video Generation under Large Viewpoint Change via On-Policy Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38146/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the task of Image-to-Video (I2V) generation, which involves transforming static images into realistic video sequences based on a textual description. While recent advancements produce photorealistic outputs, they frequently struggle to create videos with accurate and consistent object motion, especially in multi-object scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage compositional framework that decomposes I2V generation into: (i) An explicit intermediate representation generation stage, followed by (ii) A video generation stage that is conditioned on this representation. Our key innovation is the introduction of a mask-based motion trajectory as an intermediate representation, that captures both semantic object information and motion, enabling an expressive but compact representation of motion and semantics. To incorporate the learned representation in the second stage, we utilize object-level attention objectives. Specifically, we consider a spatial, per-object, masked-cross attention objective, integrating object-specific prompts into corresponding latent space regions and a masked spatio-temporal self-attention objective, ensuring frame-to-frame consistency for each object. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks with multi-object and high-motion scenarios and empirically demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in temporal coherence, motion realism, and text-prompt faithfulness. Additionally, we introduce benchmark, a new challenging benchmark for single-object and multi-object I2V generation, and demonstrate our method's superiority on this benchmark. Project page is available at https://guyyariv.github.io/TTM/.