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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01724 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01724/

## 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 (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05737/) (2023)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [Rodin: A Generative Model for Sculpting 3D Digital Avatars Using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06135/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [Motion Representations for Articulated Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11280/) (2021)
- [EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -- Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17485/) (2024)
- [Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14367/) (2022)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08379/) (2021)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)
- [RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07399/) (2023)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01900/) (2024)
- [DreamPose: Fashion Image-to-Video Synthesis via Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06025/) (2023)
- [ControlNeXt: Powerful and Efficient Control for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06070/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training for One-Step Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08316/) (2025)
- [DisCo: Disentangled Control for Realistic Human Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00040/) (2023)
- [MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07621/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Controllable Video Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16869/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09350/) (2025)
- [Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14055/) (2025)
- [UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06155/) (2025)
- [SpeakerVid-5M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Audio-Visual Dyadic Interactive Human Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09862/) (2025)
- [DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10568/) (2025)
- [DanceTogether! Identity-Preserving Multi-Person Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18078/) (2025)
- [X-UniMotion: Animating Human Images with Expressive, Unified and Identity-Agnostic Motion Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09383/) (2025)
- [SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19320/) (2025)
- [Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13674/) (2025)
- [PoseGen: In-Context LoRA Finetuning for Pose-Controllable Long Human Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05091/) (2025)
- [CharacterShot: Controllable and Consistent 4D Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07409/) (2025)
- [PersonaLive! Expressive Portrait Image Animation for Live Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11253/) (2025)
- [HVG-3D: Bridging Real and Simulation Domains for 3D-Conditional Hand-Object Interaction Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03305/) (2026)
- [OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14250/) (2026)
- [3D-Aware Implicit Motion Control for View-Adaptive Human Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03796/) (2026)
- [iDiT-HOI: Inpainting-based Hand Object Interaction Reenactment via Video Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12847/) (2025)
- [DreamActor-M2: Universal Character Image Animation via Spatiotemporal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21716/) (2026)
- [HyperMotionX: The Dataset and Benchmark with DiT-Based Pose-Guided Human Image Animation of Complex Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22977/) (2025)
- [DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15524/) (2025)
- [Kling-MotionControl Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03160/) (2026)
- [MTVCraft: Tokenizing 4D Motion for Arbitrary Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10238/) (2025)
- [MotionWeaver: Holistic 4D-Anchored Framework for Multi-Humanoid Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13326/) (2026)
- [Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Animatable 3D Avatars with Cloth Dynamics from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14772/) (2026)
- [Image-to-Video Diffusion: From Foundations to Open Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17248/) (2026)
- [AHOY! Animatable Humans under Occlusion from YouTube Videos with Gaussian Splatting and Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17975/) (2026)
- [High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Human Image Animation with Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21905/) (2025)
- [IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07498/) (2026)
- [HairWeaver: Few-Shot Photorealistic Hair Motion Synthesis with Sim-to-Real Guided Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11117/) (2026)
- [GeoDiff4D: Geometry-Aware Diffusion for 4D Head Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24161/) (2026)

## 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/.