DreamActor-M1: Holistic, Expressive and Robust Human Image Animation with Hybrid Guidance
Not on the map. Why?
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
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
- 2019Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Imagecited by 1,612
- 2020First Order Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 704
- 2023Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animationcited by 688
- 2023Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generationcited by 640
- 2018DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wildcited by 575
- 2020One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencingcited by 444
- 2023Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformerscited by 350
- 2023MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Modelcited by 330
38 more
- 2022Rodin: A Generative Model for Sculpting 3D Digital Avatars Using Diffusioncited by 309
- 2023Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformerscited by 306
- 2024Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidancecited by 272
- 2021Motion Representations for Articulated Animationcited by 255
- 2024EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditionscited by 235
- 2022Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 210
- 2024LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Controlcited by 206
- 2021PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Renderingcited by 203
- 2024MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidancecited by 198
- 2023NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Headscited by 194
- 2024VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Timecited by 187
- 2023RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPosecited by 175
- 2024Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animationcited by 174
- 2023DreamPose: Fashion Image-to-Video Synthesis via Stable Diffusioncited by 167
- 2024ControlNeXt: Powerful and Efficient Control for Image and Video Generationcited by 159
- 2025Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training for One-Step Video Generationcited by 151
- 2023DisCo: Disentangled Control for Realistic Human Dance Generationcited by 142
- 2022MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatarscited by 131
- 2025OmniHuman-1: Rethinking the Scaling-Up of One-Stage Conditioned Human Animation Modelscited by 129
- 2022Next3D: Generative Neural Texture Rasterization for 3D-Aware Head Avatarscited by 124
- 2023MagicPose: Realistic Human Poses and Facial Expressions Retargeting with Identity-aware Diffusioncited by 117
- 2020HeadGAN: One-shot Neural Head Synthesis and Editingcited by 105
- 2024UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animationcited by 102
- 2022FaceVerse: a Fine-grained and Detail-controllable 3D Face Morphable Model from a Hybrid Datasetcited by 98
- 2022Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesiscited by 93
- 2024DeMamba: AI-Generated Video Detection on Million-Scale GenVideo Benchmarkcited by 92
- 2024X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attentioncited by 91
- 2024Animate-X: Universal Character Image Animation with Enhanced Motion Representationcited by 88
- 2024StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animationcited by 88
- 2024EMOPortraits: Emotion-enhanced Multimodal One-shot Head Avatarscited by 66
- 2024MIMO: Controllable Character Video Synthesis with Spatial Decomposed Modelingcited by 64
- 2024Human4DiT: 360-degree Human Video Generation with 4D Diffusion Transformercited by 61
- 2024SeedEdit: Align Image Re-Generation to Image Editingcited by 61
- 2025Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation with Environment Affordancecited by 61
- 2023Portrait4D: Learning One-Shot 4D Head Avatar Synthesis using Synthetic Datacited by 55
- 2023NOFA: NeRF-based One-shot Facial Avatar Reconstructioncited by 53
- 2024INFP: Audio-Driven Interactive Head Generation in Dyadic Conversationscited by 40
- 2025HumanDiT: Pose-Guided Diffusion Transformer for Long-form Human Motion Video Generationcited by 39
50 most cited of 59 All 59 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 18; 2026: 18.
36 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2025Controllable Video Generation: A Surveycited by 98
- 2025Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generationcited by 90
- 2025Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replicationcited by 80
- 2025UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Expertscited by 61
- 2025SpeakerVid-5M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Audio-Visual Dyadic Interactive Human Generationcited by 30
- 2025DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformerscited by 22
- 2025DanceTogether! Identity-Preserving Multi-Person Interactive Video Generationcited by 13
- 2025X-UniMotion: Animating Human Images with Expressive, Unified and Identity-Agnostic Motion Latentscited by 13
- 2025SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservationcited by 10
- 2025Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humanscited by 10
- 2025PoseGen: In-Context LoRA Finetuning for Pose-Controllable Long Human Video Generationcited by 9
- 2025CharacterShot: Controllable and Consistent 4D Character Animationcited by 9
24 more
- 2025PersonaLive! Expressive Portrait Image Animation for Live Streamingcited by 9
- 2026HVG-3D: Bridging Real and Simulation Domains for 3D-Conditional Hand-Object Interaction Video Synthesiscited by 7
- 2026OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfercited by 6
- 20263D-Aware Implicit Motion Control for View-Adaptive Human Video Generationcited by 6
- 2025iDiT-HOI: Inpainting-based Hand Object Interaction Reenactment via Video Diffusion Transformercited by 5
- 2026DreamActor-M2: Universal Character Image Animation via Spatiotemporal In-Context Learningcited by 5
- 2025HyperMotionX: The Dataset and Benchmark with DiT-Based Pose-Guided Human Image Animation of Complex Motionscited by 4
- 2025DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representationscited by 4
- 2026Kling-MotionControl Technical Reportcited by 4
- 2025MTVCraft: Tokenizing 4D Motion for Arbitrary Character Animationcited by 3
- 2026MotionWeaver: Holistic 4D-Anchored Framework for Multi-Humanoid Image Animationcited by 3
- 2026Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Animatable 3D Avatars with Cloth Dynamics from a Single Imagecited by 3
- 2026Image-to-Video Diffusion: From Foundations to Open Frontierscited by 3
- 2026AHOY! Animatable Humans under Occlusion from YouTube Videos with Gaussian Splatting and Video Diffusion Priorscited by 2
- 2025High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Human Image Animation with Diffusion Transformercited by 1
- 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animationcited by 1
- 2026HairWeaver: Few-Shot Photorealistic Hair Motion Synthesis with Sim-to-Real Guided Video Diffusioncited by 1
- 2026GeoDiff4D: Geometry-Aware Diffusion for 4D Head Avatar Reconstructioncited by 0
- 2026DISPLAY: Directable Human-Object Interaction Video Generation via Sparse Motion Guidance and Multi-Task Auxiliarycited by 0
- 2026ONE-SHOT: Compositional Human-Environment Video Synthesis via Spatial-Decoupled Motion Injection and Hybrid Context Integrationcited by 0
- 2026Beyond Skeletons: Learning Animation Directly from Driving Videos with Same2X Training Strategycited by 0
- 2026EMOSH: Expressive Motion and Shape Disentanglement for Human Animationcited by 0
- 2026FlowDance: Music-Driven Dance Video Generation with Parallel Pose and RGB Streamscited by 0
- 2026RASA: Disentangled Spatial-Motional Priors for Cross-Identity Character Animationcited by 0
- 2026RASA: Disentangled Spatial-Motional Priors for Cross-Identity Character Animation28 Aug 2026
- 2026FlowDance: Music-Driven Dance Video Generation with Parallel Pose and RGB Streams16 Aug 2026
- 2026EMOSH: Expressive Motion and Shape Disentanglement for Human Animation26 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Skeletons: Learning Animation Directly from Driving Videos with Same2X Training Strategy5 Jun 2026
- 2026Image-to-Video Diffusion: From Foundations to Open Frontiers17 May 2026
- 2026ONE-SHOT: Compositional Human-Environment Video Synthesis via Spatial-Decoupled Motion Injection and Hybrid Context Integration1 Apr 2026
- 2026HVG-3D: Bridging Real and Simulation Domains for 3D-Conditional Hand-Object Interaction Video Synthesis31 Mar 2026
- 2026AHOY! Animatable Humans under Occlusion from YouTube Videos with Gaussian Splatting and Video Diffusion Priors18 Mar 2026
- 2026Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Animatable 3D Avatars with Cloth Dynamics from a Single Image16 Mar 2026
- 2026DISPLAY: Directable Human-Object Interaction Video Generation via Sparse Motion Guidance and Multi-Task Auxiliary10 Mar 2026
- 2026Kling-MotionControl Technical Report3 Mar 2026
- 2026GeoDiff4D: Geometry-Aware Diffusion for 4D Head Avatar Reconstruction27 Feb 2026
24 more
- 2026MotionWeaver: Holistic 4D-Anchored Framework for Multi-Humanoid Image Animation11 Feb 2026
- 2026HairWeaver: Few-Shot Photorealistic Hair Motion Synthesis with Sim-to-Real Guided Video Diffusion11 Feb 2026
- 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animation7 Feb 2026
- 20263D-Aware Implicit Motion Control for View-Adaptive Human Video Generation3 Feb 2026
- 2026DreamActor-M2: Universal Character Image Animation via Spatiotemporal In-Context Learning29 Jan 2026
- 2026OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfer20 Jan 2026
- 2025High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Human Image Animation with Diffusion Transformer26 Dec 2025
- 2025DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representations17 Dec 2025
- 2025Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humans15 Dec 2025
- 2025PersonaLive! Expressive Portrait Image Animation for Live Streaming12 Dec 2025
- 2025SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservation24 Nov 2025
- 2025Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replication17 Sep 2025
- 2025UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Experts7 Sep 2025
- 2025X-UniMotion: Animating Human Images with Expressive, Unified and Identity-Agnostic Motion Latents12 Aug 2025
- 2025CharacterShot: Controllable and Consistent 4D Character Animation10 Aug 2025
- 2025PoseGen: In-Context LoRA Finetuning for Pose-Controllable Long Human Video Generation7 Aug 2025
- 2025Controllable Video Generation: A Survey22 Jul 2025
- 2025SpeakerVid-5M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Audio-Visual Dyadic Interactive Human Generation14 Jul 2025
- 2025iDiT-HOI: Inpainting-based Hand Object Interaction Reenactment via Video Diffusion Transformer15 Jun 2025
- 2025DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformers12 Jun 2025
- 2025Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generation11 Jun 2025
- 2025HyperMotionX: The Dataset and Benchmark with DiT-Based Pose-Guided Human Image Animation of Complex Motions29 May 2025
- 2025DanceTogether! Identity-Preserving Multi-Person Interactive Video Generation23 May 2025
- 2025MTVCraft: Tokenizing 4D Motion for Arbitrary Character Animation15 May 2025
- 2025DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformerscited by 22
- 2025iDiT-HOI: Inpainting-based Hand Object Interaction Reenactment via Video Diffusion Transformercited by 5
- 2025HyperMotionX: The Dataset and Benchmark with DiT-Based Pose-Guided Human Image Animation of Complex Motionscited by 4
- 2025DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representationscited by 4
- 2026Image-to-Video Diffusion: From Foundations to Open Frontierscited by 3
- 2026AHOY! Animatable Humans under Occlusion from YouTube Videos with Gaussian Splatting and Video Diffusion Priorscited by 2
- 2025High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Human Image Animation with Diffusion Transformercited by 1
- 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animationcited by 1
- 2026HairWeaver: Few-Shot Photorealistic Hair Motion Synthesis with Sim-to-Real Guided Video Diffusioncited by 1
- 2026Image-to-Video Diffusion: From Foundations to Open Frontiers17 May 2026
- 2026AHOY! Animatable Humans under Occlusion from YouTube Videos with Gaussian Splatting and Video Diffusion Priors18 Mar 2026
- 2026HairWeaver: Few-Shot Photorealistic Hair Motion Synthesis with Sim-to-Real Guided Video Diffusion11 Feb 2026
- 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animation7 Feb 2026
- 2025High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Human Image Animation with Diffusion Transformer26 Dec 2025
- 2025DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representations17 Dec 2025
- 2025iDiT-HOI: Inpainting-based Hand Object Interaction Reenactment via Video Diffusion Transformer15 Jun 2025
- 2025DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformers12 Jun 2025
- 2025HyperMotionX: The Dataset and Benchmark with DiT-Based Pose-Guided Human Image Animation of Complex Motions29 May 2025
- 2025Controllable Video Generation: A Surveycited by 98
- 2025Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generationcited by 90
- 2025Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replicationcited by 80
- 2025UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Expertscited by 61
- 2025SpeakerVid-5M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Audio-Visual Dyadic Interactive Human Generationcited by 30
- 2025DanceTogether! Identity-Preserving Multi-Person Interactive Video Generationcited by 13
- 2025X-UniMotion: Animating Human Images with Expressive, Unified and Identity-Agnostic Motion Latentscited by 13
- 2025SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservationcited by 10
- 2025Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humanscited by 10
- 2025PoseGen: In-Context LoRA Finetuning for Pose-Controllable Long Human Video Generationcited by 9
- 2025CharacterShot: Controllable and Consistent 4D Character Animationcited by 9
- 2025PersonaLive! Expressive Portrait Image Animation for Live Streamingcited by 9
12 most cited of 27 All 27 (JSON)
- 2026RASA: Disentangled Spatial-Motional Priors for Cross-Identity Character Animation28 Aug 2026
- 2026FlowDance: Music-Driven Dance Video Generation with Parallel Pose and RGB Streams16 Aug 2026
- 2026EMOSH: Expressive Motion and Shape Disentanglement for Human Animation26 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Skeletons: Learning Animation Directly from Driving Videos with Same2X Training Strategy5 Jun 2026
- 2026ONE-SHOT: Compositional Human-Environment Video Synthesis via Spatial-Decoupled Motion Injection and Hybrid Context Integration1 Apr 2026
- 2026HVG-3D: Bridging Real and Simulation Domains for 3D-Conditional Hand-Object Interaction Video Synthesis31 Mar 2026
- 2026Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Animatable 3D Avatars with Cloth Dynamics from a Single Image16 Mar 2026
- 2026DISPLAY: Directable Human-Object Interaction Video Generation via Sparse Motion Guidance and Multi-Task Auxiliary10 Mar 2026
- 2026Kling-MotionControl Technical Report3 Mar 2026
- 2026GeoDiff4D: Geometry-Aware Diffusion for 4D Head Avatar Reconstruction27 Feb 2026
- 2026MotionWeaver: Holistic 4D-Anchored Framework for Multi-Humanoid Image Animation11 Feb 2026
- 20263D-Aware Implicit Motion Control for View-Adaptive Human Video Generation3 Feb 2026
12 newest of 27 All 27 (JSON)
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025TalkingPose: Efficient Face and Gesture Animation with Feedback-guided Diffusion Model
- 2024VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation
- 2026MultiAnimate: Pose-Guided Image Animation Made Extensible
- 2025Stable Video-Driven Portraits
- 2024Synthesizing Moving People with 3D Control
- 2025FactorPortrait: Controllable Portrait Animation via Disentangled Expression, Pose, and Viewpoint
- 2024DreamDance: Animating Human Images by Enriching 3D Geometry Cues from 2D Poses
- 2023DreaMoving: A Human Video Generation Framework based on Diffusion Models