mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replication

arXiv 2509.14055 ↗First posted 17 Sep 2025cs.CVcited by 80

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Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Wan-Animate, a unified framework for character animation and replacement. Given a character image and a reference video, Wan-Animate can animate the character by precisely replicating the expressions and movements of the character in the video to generate high-fidelity character videos. Alternatively, it can integrate the animated character into the reference video to replace the original character, replicating the scene's lighting and color tone to achieve seamless environmental integration. Wan-Animate is built upon the Wan model. To adapt it for character animation tasks, we employ a modified input paradigm to differentiate between reference conditions and regions for generation. This design unifies multiple tasks into a common symbolic representation. We use spatially-aligned skeleton signals to replicate body motion and implicit facial features extracted from source images to reenact expressions, enabling the generation of character videos with high controllability and expressiveness. Furthermore, to enhance environmental integration during character replacement, we develop an auxiliary Relighting LoRA. This module preserves the character's appearance consistency while applying the appropriate environmental lighting and color tone. Experimental results demonstrate that Wan-Animate achieves state-of-the-art performance. We are committed to open-sourcing the model weights and its source code.

Key facts. Cited by 80 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 48 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.

Builds on

48 of 57 references.

References · 48

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  3. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  4. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  5. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
  6. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  7. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  8. 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
  9. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  10. 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,581
  11. 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformercited by 2,261
  12. 2023AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuningcited by 1,433
36 more
  1. 2018Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challengescited by 1,234
  2. 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 1,044
  3. 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 1,006
  4. 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulatorscited by 881
  5. 2020First Order Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 704
  6. 2023Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animationcited by 688
  7. 2025VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editingcited by 479
  8. 2022ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimationcited by 456
  9. 2023MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Modelcited by 330
  10. 2022Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectivescited by 320
  11. 2022Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimationcited by 275
  12. 2024Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidancecited by 272
  13. 2021Motion Representations for Articulated Animationcited by 255
  14. 2022Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 210
  15. 2024LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Controlcited by 206
  16. 2024MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidancecited by 198
  17. 2024AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animationcited by 194
  18. 2024VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Timecited by 187
  19. 2022Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigationcited by 175
  20. 2024Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animationcited by 174
  21. 2023MagicPose: Realistic Human Poses and Facial Expressions Retargeting with Identity-aware Diffusioncited by 117
  22. 2024UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animationcited by 102
  23. 2024X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attentioncited by 91
  24. 2024StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animationcited by 88
  25. 2024EMOPortraits: Emotion-enhanced Multimodal One-shot Head Avatarscited by 66
  26. 2024MIMO: Controllable Character Video Synthesis with Spatial Decomposed Modelingcited by 64
  27. 2025Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation with Environment Affordancecited by 61
  28. 2025HunyuanPortrait: Implicit Condition Control for Enhanced Portrait Animationcited by 59
  29. 2025UniAnimate-DiT: Human Image Animation with Large-Scale Video Diffusion Transformercited by 42
  30. 2024FLOAT: Generative Motion Latent Flow Matching for Audio-driven Talking Portraitcited by 40
  31. 2025HumanDiT: Pose-Guided Diffusion Transformer for Long-form Human Motion Video Generationcited by 39
  32. 2025DreamActor-M1: Holistic, Expressive and Robust Human Image Animation with Hybrid Guidancecited by 36
  33. 2025RealisDance-DiT: Simple yet Strong Baseline towards Controllable Character Animation in the Wildcited by 29
  34. 2025X-NeMo: Expressive Neural Motion Reenactment via Disentangled Latent Attentioncited by 28
  35. 2024AnchorCrafter: Animate Cyber-Anchors Selling Your Products via Human-Object Interacting Video Generationcited by 26
  36. 2025DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformerscited by 22

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 13; 2026: 67.

80 papers.

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  1. 2026World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AIcited by 50
  2. 2026VINO: A Unified Visual Generator with Interleaved OmniModal Contextcited by 26
  3. 2026DreamID-Omni: Unified Framework for Controllable Human-Centric Audio-Video Generationcited by 20
  4. 2025SCAIL: Towards Studio-Grade Character Animation via In-Context Learning of 3D-Consistent Pose Representationscited by 13
  5. 2025EchoMotion: Unified Human Video and Motion Generation via Dual-Modality Diffusion Transformercited by 13
  6. 2025Knot Forcing: Taming Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models for Real-time Infinite Interactive Portrait Animationcited by 11
  7. 2025SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservationcited by 10
  8. 2025Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humanscited by 10
  9. 2026PISCO: Precise Video Instance Insertion with Sparse Controlcited by 10
  10. 2025One-to-All Animation: Alignment-Free Character Animation and Image Pose Transfercited by 9
  11. 2025MACE-Dance: Motion-Appearance Cascaded Experts for Music-Driven Dance Video Generationcited by 9
  12. 2026ConsID-Gen: View-Consistent and Identity-Preserving Image-to-Video Generationcited by 8
38 more
  1. 2026SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-End In-Context Conditioningcited by 8
  2. 2026MoCha:End-to-End Video Character Replacement without Structural Guidancecited by 6
  3. 2026CoMoVi: Co-Generation of 3D Human Motions and Realistic Videoscited by 6
  4. 2026OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfercited by 6
  5. 2025FlashPortrait: 6x Faster Infinite Portrait Animation with Adaptive Latent Predictioncited by 5
  6. 2026DreamActor-M2: Universal Character Image Animation via Spatiotemporal In-Context Learningcited by 5
  7. 2026Worldscape-MoE: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts World Model for Scalable Heterogeneous Action Controlcited by 5
  8. 2025Exploring MLLM-Diffusion Information Transfer with MetaCanvascited by 4
  9. 2025DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representationscited by 4
  10. 2026Kling-MotionControl Technical Reportcited by 4
  11. 2026VEFX-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Generic Video Editing and Visual Effectscited by 4
  12. 2026SocialDirector: Training-Free Social Interaction Control for Multi-Person Video Generationcited by 4
  13. 2026Making Avatars Interact: Towards Text-Driven Human-Object Interaction for Controllable Talking Avatarscited by 3
  14. 2026Let Your Image Move with Your Motion! -- Implicit Multi-Object Multi-Motion Transfercited by 3
  15. 2026Large-scale Codec Avatars: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Large-scale Avatar Pretrainingcited by 3
  16. 2026TripVVT: A Large-Scale Triplet Dataset and a Coarse-Mask Baseline for In-the-Wild Video Virtual Try-Oncited by 3
  17. 2026EverAnimate: Minute-Scale Human Animation via Latent Flow Restorationcited by 3
  18. 2026OmniDance: Multimodal Driven Dance Video Generation with Large-scale Internet Datacited by 3
  19. 2026Reshoot-Anything: A Self-Supervised Model for In-the-Wild Video Reshootingcited by 2
  20. 2026CoinVE-200K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Compositional Instruction-Guided Video Editingcited by 2
  21. 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animationcited by 1
  22. 2026FlexAM: Flexible Appearance-Motion Decomposition for Versatile Video Generation Controlcited by 1
  23. 2026InterDyad: Interactive Dyadic Speech-to-Video Generation by Querying Intermediate Visual Guidancecited by 1
  24. 2026GenLCA: 3D Diffusion for Full-Body Avatars from In-the-Wild Videoscited by 1
  25. 2026PortraitDirector: A Hierarchical Disentanglement Framework for Controllable and Real-time Facial Reenactmentcited by 1
  26. 2026MiVE: Multiscale Vision-language features for reference-guided video Editingcited by 1
  27. 2026Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generationcited by 1
  28. 2026AgentHOI: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Human-Object-Interaction Video Generation via Implicit Representation Alignmentcited by 1
  29. 2026ID-V2V: Identity-Preserving Video Restylizationcited by 1
  30. 2026Real-Time Human-Centric World Modeling for Upper-Body Human-Object Interactioncited by 1
  31. 2026EgoPlay: Event-Triggered Video Editing for Egocentric Streamscited by 1
  32. 2026OmniEdit-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Video Editingcited by 1
  33. 2026LiveAnimate: Stable Long-Form Streaming Human Animation in Real-Timecited by 1
  34. 2025Reframing Music-Driven 2D Dance Pose Generation as Multi-Channel Image Generationcited by 0
  35. 2025Instant Expressive Gaussian Head Avatars at Over 100 FPScited by 0
  36. 2025Screen, Cache, and Match: A Training-Free Causality-Consistent Reference Frame Framework for Human Animationcited by 0
  37. 2026ExpPortrait: Expressive Portrait Generation via Personalized Representationcited by 0
  38. 2026FaceCam: Portrait Video Camera Control via Scale-Aware Conditioningcited by 0

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