# PersonaAnimator: Personalized Motion Transfer from Unconstrained Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19895 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19895/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [OmniControl: Control Any Joint at Any Time for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08580/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [VideoDirectorGPT: Consistent Multi-scene Video Generation via LLM-Guided Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15091/) (2023)
- [DwNet: Dense warp-based network for pose-guided human video generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09139/) (2019)
- [VDT: General-purpose Video Diffusion Transformers via Mask Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13311/) (2023)
- [UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01188/) (2024)
- [Unpaired Motion Style Transfer from Video to Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05751/) (2020)
- [Animate-X: Universal Character Image Animation with Enhanced Motion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10306/) (2024)
- [StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17697/) (2024)
- [DartControl: A Diffusion-Based Autoregressive Motion Model for Real-Time Text-Driven Motion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05260/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Style Modelling of Human Locomotion via Feature-Wise Transformations and Local Motion Phases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04439/) (2022)
- [MotionEditor: Editing Video Motion via Content-Aware Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18830/) (2023)
- [Vitron: A Unified Pixel-level Vision LLM for Understanding, Generating, Segmenting, Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19806/) (2024)
- [Implicit Temporal Modeling with Learnable Alignment for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10465/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Gait Recognition: Algorithms, Datasets and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13732/) (2022)
- [StableAvatar: Infinite-Length Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08248/) (2025)
- [DisPose: Disentangling Pose Guidance for Controllable Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09349/) (2024)
- [MotionFollower: Editing Video Motion via Lightweight Score-Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20325/) (2024)
- [HumanDreamer: Generating Controllable Human-Motion Videos via Decoupled Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24026/) (2025)
- [MoST: Motion Style Transformer between Diverse Action Contents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06225/) (2024)
- [StableAnimator++: Overcoming Pose Misalignment and Face Distortion for Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15064/) (2025)
- [Motion Capture Dataset for Practical Use of AI-based Motion Editing and Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08861/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in motion generation show remarkable progress. However, several limitations remain: (1) Existing pose-guided character motion transfer methods merely replicate motion without learning its style characteristics, resulting in inexpressive characters. (2) Motion style transfer methods rely heavily on motion capture data, which is difficult to obtain. (3) Generated motions sometimes violate physical laws. To address these challenges, this paper pioneers a new task: Video-to-Video Motion Personalization. We propose a novel framework, PersonaAnimator, which learns personalized motion patterns directly from unconstrained videos. This enables personalized motion transfer. To support this task, we introduce PersonaVid, the first video-based personalized motion dataset. It contains 20 motion content categories and 120 motion style categories. We further propose a Physics-aware Motion Style Regularization mechanism to enforce physical plausibility in the generated motions. Extensive experiments show that PersonaAnimator outperforms state-of-the-art motion transfer methods and sets a new benchmark for the Video-to-Video Motion Personalization task.