# STANCE: Motion Coherent Video Generation Via Sparse-to-Dense Anchored Encoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14588 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14588/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [VideoCrafter2: Overcoming Data Limitations for High-Quality Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09047/) (2024)
- [VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19512/) (2023)
- [Latent Video Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13221/) (2022)
- [DragNUWA: Fine-grained Control in Video Generation by Integrating Text, Image, and Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08089/) (2023)
- [Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15977/) (2024)
- [Step-Video-T2V Technical Report: The Practice, Challenges, and Future of Video Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10248/) (2025)
- [Do generative video models understand physical principles?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09038/) (2025)
- [DragAnything: Motion Control for Anything using Entity Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07420/) (2024)
- [Motion-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Controllable Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14404/) (2023)
- [MOFA-Video: Controllable Image Animation via Generative Motion Field Adaptions in Frozen Image-to-Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20222/) (2024)
- [SG-I2V: Self-Guided Trajectory Control in Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04989/) (2024)
- [VLIPP: Towards Physically Plausible Video Generation with Vision and Language Informed Physical Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23368/) (2025)
- [MotionPro: A Precise Motion Controller for Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20287/) (2025)
- [C-Drag: Chain-of-Thought Driven Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19868/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Teaching Video Generators to Remember: Eliciting Dynamic Memory for Out-of-Sight State Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25333/) (2026)
- [Motion Forcing: A Decoupled Framework for Robust Video Generation in Motion Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10408/) (2026)
- [OrthoPhys: Physically Plausible Video Generation with Orthogonal-View Geometry Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18639/) (2026)
- [PhysFlow: Physics-Aware Optical Flow for Motion Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08215/) (2026)
- [Physis-Lang: Self-Evolving Language as a Physical Representation for Video World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40358/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video generation has recently made striking visual progress, but maintaining coherent object motion and interactions remains difficult. We trace two practical bottlenecks: (i) human-provided motion hints (e.g., small 2D maps) often collapse to too few effective tokens after encoding, weakening guidance; and (ii) optimizing for appearance and motion in a single head can favor texture over temporal consistency. We present STANCE, an image-to-video framework that addresses both issues with two simple components. First, we introduce Instance Cues -- a pixel-aligned control signal that turns sparse, user-editable hints into a dense 2.5D (camera-relative) motion field by averaging per-instance flow and augmenting with monocular depth over the instance mask. This reduces depth ambiguity compared to 2D arrow inputs while remaining easy to use. Second, we preserve the salience of these cues in token space with Dense RoPE, which tags a small set of motion tokens (anchored on the first frame) with spatial-addressable rotary embeddings. Paired with joint RGB (+) auxiliary-map prediction (segmentation or depth), our model anchors structure while RGB handles appearance, stabilizing optimization and improving temporal coherence without requiring per-frame trajectory scripts.