# What Are You Doing? A Closer Look at Controllable Human Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04666 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04666/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 73 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01569/) (2023)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [CameraCtrl: Enabling Camera Control for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02101/) (2024)
- [Panda-70M: Captioning 70M Videos with Multiple Cross-Modality Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19479/) (2024)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [EvalCrafter: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11440/) (2023)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)

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

- [DanceTogether! Identity-Preserving Multi-Person Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18078/) (2025)
- [CoMoVi: Co-Generation of 3D Human Motions and Realistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10632/) (2026)
- [Towards Fine-Grained Human Motion Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24767/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-quality benchmarks are crucial for driving progress in machine learning research. However, despite the growing interest in video generation, there is no comprehensive dataset to evaluate human synthesis. Humans can perform a wide variety of actions and interactions, but existing datasets, like TikTok, TED-Talks, and HumanVid, lack the diversity and complexity to fully capture the capabilities of video generation models. We close this gap by introducing 'What Are You Doing?' (WYD): a new benchmark for fine-grained evaluation of controllable image-to-video generation of humans. WYD consists of 1,544 captioned videos that have been meticulously collected and annotated with fine-grained categories. These allow us to systematically measure performance across 9 aspects of human generation, including actions, interactions and motion. We also propose an evaluation framework, where we adapt existing metrics for better human- and video-level assessment, as shown by human preference. Equipped with our dataset and metrics, we perform in-depth analyses of state-of-the-art open-source models in controllable image-to-video generation, showing how WYD provides novel insights about their capabilities. We release data and code to drive progress in human video generation.