# Decouple and Track: Benchmarking and Improving Video Diffusion Transformers for Motion Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17350/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 64 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [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)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (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)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [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)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [FastVMT: Eliminating Redundancy in Video Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05551/) (2026)
- [MoAlign: Motion-Centric Representation Alignment for Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19022/) (2025)
- [SMRABooth: Subject and Motion Representation Alignment for Customized Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12193/) (2025)
- [Motion Attribution for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08828/) (2026)
- [RecTok: Reconstruction Distillation along Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13421/) (2025)
- [Does Hearing Help Seeing? Investigating Audio-Video Joint Denoising for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02457/) (2025)
- [MotionAdapter: Video Motion Transfer via Content-Aware Attention Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01955/) (2026)
- [Screen, Cache, and Match: A Training-Free Causality-Consistent Reference Frame Framework for Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22160/) (2025)
- [MotionGrounder: Grounded Multi-Object Motion Transfer via Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00853/) (2026)
- [Towards Customized Multimodal Role-Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08129/) (2026)
- [QWERTY: Training-Free Motion Control via Query-Warped Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01869/) (2026)
- [Controlling Motion Transfer in Diffusion Transformers via Attention Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11081/) (2026)
- [Motion Beyond Morphology: Bootstrapping Cross-Category Motion Transfer from Abstract Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01628/) (2026)
- [What Moves? Localized Motion Representations for Compositional Scene Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04383/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The motion transfer task aims to transfer motion from a source video to newly generated videos, requiring the model to decouple motion from appearance. Previous diffusion-based methods primarily rely on separate spatial and temporal attention mechanisms within the 3D U-Net. In contrast, state-of-the-art video Diffusion Transformers (DiT) models use 3D full attention, which does not explicitly separate temporal and spatial information. Thus, the interaction between spatial and temporal dimensions makes decoupling motion and appearance more challenging for DiT models. In this paper, we propose DeT, a method that adapts DiT models to improve motion transfer ability. Our approach introduces a simple yet effective temporal kernel to smooth DiT features along the temporal dimension, facilitating the decoupling of foreground motion from background appearance. Meanwhile, the temporal kernel effectively captures temporal variations in DiT features, which are closely related to motion. Moreover, we introduce explicit supervision along dense trajectories in the latent feature space to further enhance motion consistency. Additionally, we present MTBench, a general and challenging benchmark for motion transfer. We also introduce a hybrid motion fidelity metric that considers both the global and local motion similarity. Therefore, our work provides a more comprehensive evaluation than previous works. Extensive experiments on MTBench demonstrate that DeT achieves the best trade-off between motion fidelity and edit fidelity.