Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replication
Not on the map. Why?
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
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
- 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,177
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
- 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,581
- 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformercited by 2,261
- 2023AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuningcited by 1,433
36 more
- 2018Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challengescited by 1,234
- 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 1,044
- 2025FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Spacecited by 1,006
- 2024WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulatorscited by 881
- 2020First Order Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 704
- 2023Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animationcited by 688
- 2025VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editingcited by 479
- 2022ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimationcited by 456
- 2023MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Modelcited by 330
- 2022Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectivescited by 320
- 2022Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimationcited by 275
- 2024Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidancecited by 272
- 2021Motion Representations for Articulated Animationcited by 255
- 2022Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 210
- 2024LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Controlcited by 206
- 2024MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidancecited by 198
- 2024AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animationcited by 194
- 2024VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Timecited by 187
- 2022Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigationcited by 175
- 2024Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animationcited by 174
- 2023MagicPose: Realistic Human Poses and Facial Expressions Retargeting with Identity-aware Diffusioncited by 117
- 2024UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animationcited by 102
- 2024X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attentioncited by 91
- 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
- 2025Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation with Environment Affordancecited by 61
- 2025HunyuanPortrait: Implicit Condition Control for Enhanced Portrait Animationcited by 59
- 2025UniAnimate-DiT: Human Image Animation with Large-Scale Video Diffusion Transformercited by 42
- 2024FLOAT: Generative Motion Latent Flow Matching for Audio-driven Talking Portraitcited by 40
- 2025HumanDiT: Pose-Guided Diffusion Transformer for Long-form Human Motion Video Generationcited by 39
- 2025DreamActor-M1: Holistic, Expressive and Robust Human Image Animation with Hybrid Guidancecited by 36
- 2025RealisDance-DiT: Simple yet Strong Baseline towards Controllable Character Animation in the Wildcited by 29
- 2025X-NeMo: Expressive Neural Motion Reenactment via Disentangled Latent Attentioncited by 28
- 2024AnchorCrafter: Animate Cyber-Anchors Selling Your Products via Human-Object Interacting Video Generationcited by 26
- 2025DreamActor-H1: High-Fidelity Human-Product Demonstration Video Generation via Motion-designed Diffusion Transformerscited by 22
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 13; 2026: 67.
80 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2026World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AIcited by 50
- 2026VINO: A Unified Visual Generator with Interleaved OmniModal Contextcited by 26
- 2026DreamID-Omni: Unified Framework for Controllable Human-Centric Audio-Video Generationcited by 20
- 2025SCAIL: Towards Studio-Grade Character Animation via In-Context Learning of 3D-Consistent Pose Representationscited by 13
- 2025EchoMotion: Unified Human Video and Motion Generation via Dual-Modality Diffusion Transformercited by 13
- 2025Knot Forcing: Taming Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models for Real-time Infinite Interactive Portrait Animationcited by 11
- 2025SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservationcited by 10
- 2025Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humanscited by 10
- 2026PISCO: Precise Video Instance Insertion with Sparse Controlcited by 10
- 2025One-to-All Animation: Alignment-Free Character Animation and Image Pose Transfercited by 9
- 2025MACE-Dance: Motion-Appearance Cascaded Experts for Music-Driven Dance Video Generationcited by 9
- 2026ConsID-Gen: View-Consistent and Identity-Preserving Image-to-Video Generationcited by 8
38 more
- 2026SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-End In-Context Conditioningcited by 8
- 2026MoCha:End-to-End Video Character Replacement without Structural Guidancecited by 6
- 2026CoMoVi: Co-Generation of 3D Human Motions and Realistic Videoscited by 6
- 2026OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfercited by 6
- 2025FlashPortrait: 6x Faster Infinite Portrait Animation with Adaptive Latent Predictioncited by 5
- 2026DreamActor-M2: Universal Character Image Animation via Spatiotemporal In-Context Learningcited by 5
- 2026Worldscape-MoE: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts World Model for Scalable Heterogeneous Action Controlcited by 5
- 2025Exploring MLLM-Diffusion Information Transfer with MetaCanvascited by 4
- 2025DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representationscited by 4
- 2026Kling-MotionControl Technical Reportcited by 4
- 2026VEFX-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Generic Video Editing and Visual Effectscited by 4
- 2026SocialDirector: Training-Free Social Interaction Control for Multi-Person Video Generationcited by 4
- 2026Making Avatars Interact: Towards Text-Driven Human-Object Interaction for Controllable Talking Avatarscited by 3
- 2026Let Your Image Move with Your Motion! -- Implicit Multi-Object Multi-Motion Transfercited by 3
- 2026Large-scale Codec Avatars: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Large-scale Avatar Pretrainingcited by 3
- 2026TripVVT: A Large-Scale Triplet Dataset and a Coarse-Mask Baseline for In-the-Wild Video Virtual Try-Oncited by 3
- 2026EverAnimate: Minute-Scale Human Animation via Latent Flow Restorationcited by 3
- 2026OmniDance: Multimodal Driven Dance Video Generation with Large-scale Internet Datacited by 3
- 2026Reshoot-Anything: A Self-Supervised Model for In-the-Wild Video Reshootingcited by 2
- 2026CoinVE-200K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Compositional Instruction-Guided Video Editingcited by 2
- 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animationcited by 1
- 2026FlexAM: Flexible Appearance-Motion Decomposition for Versatile Video Generation Controlcited by 1
- 2026InterDyad: Interactive Dyadic Speech-to-Video Generation by Querying Intermediate Visual Guidancecited by 1
- 2026GenLCA: 3D Diffusion for Full-Body Avatars from In-the-Wild Videoscited by 1
- 2026PortraitDirector: A Hierarchical Disentanglement Framework for Controllable and Real-time Facial Reenactmentcited by 1
- 2026MiVE: Multiscale Vision-language features for reference-guided video Editingcited by 1
- 2026Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generationcited by 1
- 2026AgentHOI: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Human-Object-Interaction Video Generation via Implicit Representation Alignmentcited by 1
- 2026ID-V2V: Identity-Preserving Video Restylizationcited by 1
- 2026Real-Time Human-Centric World Modeling for Upper-Body Human-Object Interactioncited by 1
- 2026EgoPlay: Event-Triggered Video Editing for Egocentric Streamscited by 1
- 2026OmniEdit-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Video Editingcited by 1
- 2026LiveAnimate: Stable Long-Form Streaming Human Animation in Real-Timecited by 1
- 2025Reframing Music-Driven 2D Dance Pose Generation as Multi-Channel Image Generationcited by 0
- 2025Instant Expressive Gaussian Head Avatars at Over 100 FPScited by 0
- 2025Screen, Cache, and Match: A Training-Free Causality-Consistent Reference Frame Framework for Human Animationcited by 0
- 2026ExpPortrait: Expressive Portrait Generation via Personalized Representationcited by 0
- 2026FaceCam: Portrait Video Camera Control via Scale-Aware Conditioningcited by 0
50 most cited of 80 All 80 (JSON)
- 2026PixReenact: Pixel-Conditioned Causal Video Diffusion for Streaming Head-Avatar Reenactment4 Oct 2026
- 2026WeLike2Party! In-Context Motion Transfer for Multi-Human Image Animation29 Sep 2026
- 2026VideoX-Qwen: Data-Centric Instruction-Based Video Editing22 Sep 2026
- 2026MIRAGE: Full-Body Bystander Privacy for Smart Glasses with Consent-Based Restoration21 Sep 2026
- 2026OmniVBench: A Benchmark and Large-Scale Dataset for Omni Reference-to-Video Generation18 Sep 2026
- 2026SignRefine: Adapting Foundational Video Models for Sign Language Generation8 Sep 2026
- 2026PAI-Actor: Cinematic Multi-Character Replacement in Dynamic Scenes5 Sep 2026
- 2026BooM-VVT: Boosting Mask-Free Video Virtual Try-On with Image-Level Pseudo Data3 Sep 2026
- 2026FlashRender: Few-Step Generative Rendering via Camera-Controlled Video MeanFlow3 Sep 2026
- 2026RASA: Disentangled Spatial-Motional Priors for Cross-Identity Character Animation28 Aug 2026
- 2026EditaLive! Unified Character Video Editing for Live Streaming27 Aug 2026
- 2026Human-Centric Intelligence in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey18 Aug 2026
38 more
- 2026CoinVE-200K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Compositional Instruction-Guided Video Editing18 Aug 2026
- 2026UniSwap: Streaming Audio-Visual Identity Swapping for Talking Videos12 Aug 2026
- 2026LiveAnimate: Stable Long-Form Streaming Human Animation in Real-Time12 Aug 2026
- 2026Vorch-IR: Long-Form Unified Multimodal Identity Replacement Video Generation6 Aug 2026
- 2026OmniEdit-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Video Editing5 Aug 2026
- 2026UniMoCa: Unifying Motion and Camera Controls as Visual Proxies for Faithful Human Video Generation3 Aug 2026
- 2026EgoPlay: Event-Triggered Video Editing for Egocentric Streams27 Jul 2026
- 2026ViDS: Video Diffusion Shader using 3D Face Tracking27 Jul 2026
- 2026Real-Time Human-Centric World Modeling for Upper-Body Human-Object Interaction26 Jul 2026
- 2026ID-V2V: Identity-Preserving Video Restylization24 Jul 2026
- 2026AgentHOI: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Human-Object-Interaction Video Generation via Implicit Representation Alignment24 Jul 2026
- 2026Worldscape-MoE: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts World Model for Scalable Heterogeneous Action Control4 Jul 2026
- 2026LUNA: Learning Universal 3D Human Animation Beyond Skinning30 Jun 2026
- 2026OmniDance: Multimodal Driven Dance Video Generation with Large-scale Internet Data29 Jun 2026
- 2026EMOSH: Expressive Motion and Shape Disentanglement for Human Animation26 Jun 2026
- 2026Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models17 Jun 2026
- 2026Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation11 Jun 2026
- 2026SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-End In-Context Conditioning9 Jun 2026
- 2026EverAnimate: Minute-Scale Human Animation via Latent Flow Restoration14 May 2026
- 2026MiVE: Multiscale Vision-language features for reference-guided video Editing14 May 2026
- 2026World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI12 May 2026
- 2026SocialDirector: Training-Free Social Interaction Control for Multi-Person Video Generation11 May 2026
- 2026Implicit Preference Alignment for Human Image Animation8 May 2026
- 2026ActCam: Zero-Shot Joint Camera and 3D Motion Control for Video Generation7 May 2026
- 2026SignVerse-2M: A Two-Million-Clip Pose-Native Universe of 55+ Sign Languages3 May 2026
- 2026TripVVT: A Large-Scale Triplet Dataset and a Coarse-Mask Baseline for In-the-Wild Video Virtual Try-On30 Apr 2026
- 2026Generate Your Talking Avatar from Video Reference30 Apr 2026
- 2026Reshoot-Anything: A Self-Supervised Model for In-the-Wild Video Reshooting23 Apr 2026
- 2026ReImagine: Rethinking Controllable High-Quality Human Video Generation via Image-First Synthesis21 Apr 2026
- 2026PortraitDirector: A Hierarchical Disentanglement Framework for Controllable and Real-time Facial Reenactment21 Apr 2026
- 2026DanceCrafter: Fine-Grained Text-Driven Controllable Dance Generation via Choreographic Syntax20 Apr 2026
- 2026VEFX-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Generic Video Editing and Visual Effects17 Apr 2026
- 2026GenLCA: 3D Diffusion for Full-Body Avatars from In-the-Wild Videos8 Apr 2026
- 2026Large-scale Codec Avatars: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Large-scale Avatar Pretraining2 Apr 2026
- 2026ONE-SHOT: Compositional Human-Environment Video Synthesis via Spatial-Decoupled Motion Injection and Hybrid Context Integration1 Apr 2026
- 2026InterDyad: Interactive Dyadic Speech-to-Video Generation by Querying Intermediate Visual Guidance24 Mar 2026
- 2026PerformRecast: Expression and Head Pose Disentanglement for Portrait Video Editing20 Mar 2026
- 2026AnyCrowd: Instance-Isolated Identity-Pose Binding for Arbitrary Multi-Character Animation16 Mar 2026
50 newest of 80 All 80 (JSON)
- 2025EchoMotion: Unified Human Video and Motion Generation via Dual-Modality Diffusion Transformercited by 13
- 2025Knot Forcing: Taming Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models for Real-time Infinite Interactive Portrait Animationcited by 11
- 2026PISCO: Precise Video Instance Insertion with Sparse Controlcited by 10
- 2025One-to-All Animation: Alignment-Free Character Animation and Image Pose Transfercited by 9
- 2025DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representationscited by 4
- 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animationcited by 1
- 2026GenLCA: 3D Diffusion for Full-Body Avatars from In-the-Wild Videoscited by 1
- 2026AgentHOI: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Human-Object-Interaction Video Generation via Implicit Representation Alignmentcited by 1
- 2026EgoPlay: Event-Triggered Video Editing for Egocentric Streamscited by 1
- 2025Instant Expressive Gaussian Head Avatars at Over 100 FPScited by 0
- 2026ExpPortrait: Expressive Portrait Generation via Personalized Representationcited by 0
- 2026Controllable Complex Human Motion Video Generation via Text-to-Skeleton Cascadescited by 0
12 most cited of 15 All 15 (JSON)
- 2026PixReenact: Pixel-Conditioned Causal Video Diffusion for Streaming Head-Avatar Reenactment4 Oct 2026
- 2026SignRefine: Adapting Foundational Video Models for Sign Language Generation8 Sep 2026
- 2026EgoPlay: Event-Triggered Video Editing for Egocentric Streams27 Jul 2026
- 2026ViDS: Video Diffusion Shader using 3D Face Tracking27 Jul 2026
- 2026AgentHOI: Multi-Agent Reasoning for Human-Object-Interaction Video Generation via Implicit Representation Alignment24 Jul 2026
- 2026GenLCA: 3D Diffusion for Full-Body Avatars from In-the-Wild Videos8 Apr 2026
- 2026Controllable Complex Human Motion Video Generation via Text-to-Skeleton Cascades9 Mar 2026
- 2026ExpPortrait: Expressive Portrait Generation via Personalized Representation23 Feb 2026
- 2026PISCO: Precise Video Instance Insertion with Sparse Control9 Feb 2026
- 2026IM-Animation: An Implicit Motion Representation for Identity-decoupled Character Animation7 Feb 2026
- 2025Knot Forcing: Taming Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models for Real-time Infinite Interactive Portrait Animation25 Dec 2025
- 2025EchoMotion: Unified Human Video and Motion Generation via Dual-Modality Diffusion Transformer21 Dec 2025
12 newest of 15 All 15 (JSON)
- 2026Implicit Preference Alignment for Human Image Animationcited by 0
- 2026Implicit Preference Alignment for Human Image Animation8 May 2026
- 2026VINO: A Unified Visual Generator with Interleaved OmniModal Contextcited by 26
- 2026DreamID-Omni: Unified Framework for Controllable Human-Centric Audio-Video Generationcited by 20
- 2025SCAIL: Towards Studio-Grade Character Animation via In-Context Learning of 3D-Consistent Pose Representationscited by 13
- 2025SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservationcited by 10
- 2025Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humanscited by 10
- 2025MACE-Dance: Motion-Appearance Cascaded Experts for Music-Driven Dance Video Generationcited by 9
- 2026ConsID-Gen: View-Consistent and Identity-Preserving Image-to-Video Generationcited by 8
- 2026SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-End In-Context Conditioningcited by 8
- 2026MoCha:End-to-End Video Character Replacement without Structural Guidancecited by 6
- 2026CoMoVi: Co-Generation of 3D Human Motions and Realistic Videoscited by 6
- 2026OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfercited by 6
- 2025FlashPortrait: 6x Faster Infinite Portrait Animation with Adaptive Latent Predictioncited by 5
12 most cited of 60 All 60 (JSON)
- 2026WeLike2Party! In-Context Motion Transfer for Multi-Human Image Animation29 Sep 2026
- 2026VideoX-Qwen: Data-Centric Instruction-Based Video Editing22 Sep 2026
- 2026MIRAGE: Full-Body Bystander Privacy for Smart Glasses with Consent-Based Restoration21 Sep 2026
- 2026OmniVBench: A Benchmark and Large-Scale Dataset for Omni Reference-to-Video Generation18 Sep 2026
- 2026PAI-Actor: Cinematic Multi-Character Replacement in Dynamic Scenes5 Sep 2026
- 2026BooM-VVT: Boosting Mask-Free Video Virtual Try-On with Image-Level Pseudo Data3 Sep 2026
- 2026FlashRender: Few-Step Generative Rendering via Camera-Controlled Video MeanFlow3 Sep 2026
- 2026RASA: Disentangled Spatial-Motional Priors for Cross-Identity Character Animation28 Aug 2026
- 2026EditaLive! Unified Character Video Editing for Live Streaming27 Aug 2026
- 2026Human-Centric Intelligence in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey18 Aug 2026
- 2026CoinVE-200K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Compositional Instruction-Guided Video Editing18 Aug 2026
- 2026UniSwap: Streaming Audio-Visual Identity Swapping for Talking Videos12 Aug 2026
12 newest of 60 All 60 (JSON)