# TACO: Taming Diffusion for in-the-wild Video Amodal Completion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 100 of its 126 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 100)

- [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 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)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [GWM: Towards Scalable Gaussian World Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17600/) (2025)
- [Decompositional Neural Scene Reconstruction with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14830/) (2025)
- [DreamArt: Generating Interactable Articulated Objects from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05763/) (2025)
- [Trace3D: Consistent Segmentation Lifting via Gaussian Instance Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03227/) (2025)
- [GENA3D: Generative Amodal 3D Modeling by Bridging 2D Priors and 3D Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21945/) (2025)
- [EGM: Efficient Visual Grounding Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13633/) (2026)
- [SynergyAmodal: Deocclude Anything with Text Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19506/) (2025)
- [Training for X-Ray Vision: Amodal Segmentation, Amodal Content Completion, and View-Invariant Object Representation from Multi-Camera Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00339/) (2025)
- [Fast 4D Mesh Generation by Spatio-Temporal Attention Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19786/) (2026)
- [Lifting Unlabeled Internet-level Data for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01907/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans can infer complete shapes and appearances of objects from limited visual cues, relying on extensive prior knowledge of the physical world. However, completing partially observable objects while ensuring consistency across video frames remains challenging for existing models, especially for unstructured, in-the-wild videos. This paper tackles the task of Video Amodal Completion (VAC), which aims to generate the complete object consistently throughout the video given a visual prompt specifying the object of interest. Leveraging the rich, consistent manifolds learned by pre-trained video diffusion models, we propose a conditional diffusion model, TACO, that repurposes these manifolds for VAC. To enable its effective and robust generalization to challenging in-the-wild scenarios, we curate a large-scale synthetic dataset with multiple difficulty levels by systematically imposing occlusions onto un-occluded videos. Building on this, we devise a progressive fine-tuning paradigm that starts with simpler recovery tasks and gradually advances to more complex ones. We demonstrate TACO's versatility on a wide range of in-the-wild videos from Internet, as well as on diverse, unseen datasets commonly used in autonomous driving, robotic manipulation, and scene understanding. Moreover, we show that TACO can be effectively applied to various downstream tasks like object reconstruction and pose estimation, highlighting its potential to facilitate physical world understanding and reasoning. Our project page is available at https://jason-aplp.github.io/TACO.