# TransFlow: Motion Knowledge Transfer from Video Diffusion Models to Video Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19789 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19789/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 44 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04145/) (2023)
- [DragNUWA: Fine-grained Control in Video Generation by Integrating Text, Image, and Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08089/) (2023)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08544/) (2023)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05210/) (2021)
- [F3Net: Fusion, Feedback and Focus for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11445/) (2019)
- [SparseCtrl: Adding Sparse Controls to Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16933/) (2023)
- [Learning Video Object Segmentation from Static Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02646/) (2016)
- [Suppress and Balance: A Simple Gated Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08074/) (2020)
- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [STEm-Seg: Spatio-temporal Embeddings for Instance Segmentation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08429/) (2020)
- [Kernelized Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08270/) (2020)
- [Full-Duplex Strategy for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03151/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [M4-SAM: Multi-Modal Mixture-of-Experts with Memory-Augmented SAM for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11760/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video salient object detection (SOD) relies on motion cues to distinguish salient objects from backgrounds, but training such models is limited by scarce video datasets compared to abundant image datasets. Existing approaches that use spatial transformations to create video sequences from static images fail for motion-guided tasks, as these transformations produce unrealistic optical flows that lack semantic understanding of motion. We present TransFlow, which transfers motion knowledge from pre-trained video diffusion models to generate realistic training data for video SOD. Video diffusion models have learned rich semantic motion priors from large-scale video data, understanding how different objects naturally move in real scenes. TransFlow leverages this knowledge to generate semantically-aware optical flows from static images, where objects exhibit natural motion patterns while preserving spatial boundaries and temporal coherence. Our method achieves improved performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating effective motion knowledge transfer.