mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

DreamActor-M1: Holistic, Expressive and Robust Human Image Animation with Hybrid Guidance

arXiv 2504.01724 ↗First posted 2 Apr 2025cs.CV cs.AIcited by 36

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Abstract (arXiv)

While recent image-based human animation methods achieve realistic body and facial motion synthesis, critical gaps remain in fine-grained holistic controllability, multi-scale adaptability, and long-term temporal coherence, which leads to their lower expressiveness and robustness. We propose a diffusion transformer (DiT) based framework, DreamActor-M1, with hybrid guidance to overcome these limitations. For motion guidance, our hybrid control signals that integrate implicit facial representations, 3D head spheres, and 3D body skeletons achieve robust control of facial expressions and body movements, while producing expressive and identity-preserving animations. For scale adaptation, to handle various body poses and image scales ranging from portraits to full-body views, we employ a progressive training strategy using data with varying resolutions and scales. For appearance guidance, we integrate motion patterns from sequential frames with complementary visual references, ensuring long-term temporal coherence for unseen regions during complex movements. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art works, delivering expressive results for portraits, upper-body, and full-body generation with robust long-term consistency. Project Page: https://grisoon.github.io/DreamActor-M1/.

Key facts. Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 59 of its 65 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2025.

Builds on

59 of 65 references.

References · 59

  1. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  2. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  3. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  4. 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
  5. 2019Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Imagecited by 1,612
  6. 2020First Order Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 704
  7. 2023Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animationcited by 688
  8. 2023Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generationcited by 640
  9. 2018DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wildcited by 575
  10. 2020One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencingcited by 444
  11. 2023Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformerscited by 350
  12. 2023MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Modelcited by 330
38 more
  1. 2022Rodin: A Generative Model for Sculpting 3D Digital Avatars Using Diffusioncited by 309
  2. 2023Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformerscited by 306
  3. 2024Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidancecited by 272
  4. 2021Motion Representations for Articulated Animationcited by 255
  5. 2024EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditionscited by 235
  6. 2022Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 210
  7. 2024LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Controlcited by 206
  8. 2021PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Renderingcited by 203
  9. 2024MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidancecited by 198
  10. 2023NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Headscited by 194
  11. 2024VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Timecited by 187
  12. 2023RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPosecited by 175
  13. 2024Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animationcited by 174
  14. 2023DreamPose: Fashion Image-to-Video Synthesis via Stable Diffusioncited by 167
  15. 2024ControlNeXt: Powerful and Efficient Control for Image and Video Generationcited by 159
  16. 2025Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training for One-Step Video Generationcited by 151
  17. 2023DisCo: Disentangled Control for Realistic Human Dance Generationcited by 142
  18. 2022MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatarscited by 131
  19. 2025OmniHuman-1: Rethinking the Scaling-Up of One-Stage Conditioned Human Animation Modelscited by 129
  20. 2022Next3D: Generative Neural Texture Rasterization for 3D-Aware Head Avatarscited by 124
  21. 2023MagicPose: Realistic Human Poses and Facial Expressions Retargeting with Identity-aware Diffusioncited by 117
  22. 2020HeadGAN: One-shot Neural Head Synthesis and Editingcited by 105
  23. 2024UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animationcited by 102
  24. 2022FaceVerse: a Fine-grained and Detail-controllable 3D Face Morphable Model from a Hybrid Datasetcited by 98
  25. 2022Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesiscited by 93
  26. 2024DeMamba: AI-Generated Video Detection on Million-Scale GenVideo Benchmarkcited by 92
  27. 2024X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attentioncited by 91
  28. 2024Animate-X: Universal Character Image Animation with Enhanced Motion Representationcited by 88
  29. 2024StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animationcited by 88
  30. 2024EMOPortraits: Emotion-enhanced Multimodal One-shot Head Avatarscited by 66
  31. 2024MIMO: Controllable Character Video Synthesis with Spatial Decomposed Modelingcited by 64
  32. 2024Human4DiT: 360-degree Human Video Generation with 4D Diffusion Transformercited by 61
  33. 2024SeedEdit: Align Image Re-Generation to Image Editingcited by 61
  34. 2025Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation with Environment Affordancecited by 61
  35. 2023Portrait4D: Learning One-Shot 4D Head Avatar Synthesis using Synthetic Datacited by 55
  36. 2023NOFA: NeRF-based One-shot Facial Avatar Reconstructioncited by 53
  37. 2024INFP: Audio-Driven Interactive Head Generation in Dyadic Conversationscited by 40
  38. 2025HumanDiT: Pose-Guided Diffusion Transformer for Long-form Human Motion Video Generationcited by 39

50 most cited of 59 All 59 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 18; 2026: 18.

36 papers.

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  1. 2025Controllable Video Generation: A Surveycited by 98
  2. 2025Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generationcited by 90
  3. 2025Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replicationcited by 80
  4. 2025UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Expertscited by 61
  5. 2025SpeakerVid-5M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Audio-Visual Dyadic Interactive Human Generationcited by 30
  6. 2025DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformerscited by 22
  7. 2025DanceTogether! Identity-Preserving Multi-Person Interactive Video Generationcited by 13
  8. 2025X-UniMotion: Animating Human Images with Expressive, Unified and Identity-Agnostic Motion Latentscited by 13
  9. 2025SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservationcited by 10
  10. 2025Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humanscited by 10
  11. 2025PoseGen: In-Context LoRA Finetuning for Pose-Controllable Long Human Video Generationcited by 9
  12. 2025CharacterShot: Controllable and Consistent 4D Character Animationcited by 9
24 more
  1. 2025PersonaLive! Expressive Portrait Image Animation for Live Streamingcited by 9
  2. 2026HVG-3D: Bridging Real and Simulation Domains for 3D-Conditional Hand-Object Interaction Video Synthesiscited by 7
  3. 2026OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfercited by 6
  4. 20263D-Aware Implicit Motion Control for View-Adaptive Human Video Generationcited by 6
  5. 2025iDiT-HOI: Inpainting-based Hand Object Interaction Reenactment via Video Diffusion Transformercited by 5
  6. 2026DreamActor-M2: Universal Character Image Animation via Spatiotemporal In-Context Learningcited by 5
  7. 2025HyperMotionX: The Dataset and Benchmark with DiT-Based Pose-Guided Human Image Animation of Complex Motionscited by 4
  8. 2025DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representationscited by 4
  9. 2026Kling-MotionControl Technical Reportcited by 4
  10. 2025MTVCraft: Tokenizing 4D Motion for Arbitrary Character Animationcited by 3
  11. 2026MotionWeaver: Holistic 4D-Anchored Framework for Multi-Humanoid Image Animationcited by 3
  12. 2026Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Animatable 3D Avatars with Cloth Dynamics from a Single Imagecited by 3
  13. 2026Image-to-Video Diffusion: From Foundations to Open Frontierscited by 3
  14. 2026AHOY! Animatable Humans under Occlusion from YouTube Videos with Gaussian Splatting and Video Diffusion Priorscited by 2
  15. 2025High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Human Image Animation with Diffusion Transformercited by 1
  16. 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animationcited by 1
  17. 2026HairWeaver: Few-Shot Photorealistic Hair Motion Synthesis with Sim-to-Real Guided Video Diffusioncited by 1
  18. 2026GeoDiff4D: Geometry-Aware Diffusion for 4D Head Avatar Reconstructioncited by 0
  19. 2026DISPLAY: Directable Human-Object Interaction Video Generation via Sparse Motion Guidance and Multi-Task Auxiliarycited by 0
  20. 2026ONE-SHOT: Compositional Human-Environment Video Synthesis via Spatial-Decoupled Motion Injection and Hybrid Context Integrationcited by 0
  21. 2026Beyond Skeletons: Learning Animation Directly from Driving Videos with Same2X Training Strategycited by 0
  22. 2026EMOSH: Expressive Motion and Shape Disentanglement for Human Animationcited by 0
  23. 2026FlowDance: Music-Driven Dance Video Generation with Parallel Pose and RGB Streamscited by 0
  24. 2026RASA: Disentangled Spatial-Motional Priors for Cross-Identity Character Animationcited by 0

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  1. 2025TalkingPose: Efficient Face and Gesture Animation with Feedback-guided Diffusion Model
  2. 2024VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation
  3. 2026MultiAnimate: Pose-Guided Image Animation Made Extensible
  4. 2025Stable Video-Driven Portraits
  5. 2024Synthesizing Moving People with 3D Control
  6. 2025FactorPortrait: Controllable Portrait Animation via Disentangled Expression, Pose, and Viewpoint
  7. 2024DreamDance: Animating Human Images by Enriching 3D Geometry Cues from 2D Poses
  8. 2023DreaMoving: A Human Video Generation Framework based on Diffusion Models