# Motion Marionette: Rethinking Rigid Motion Transfer via Prior Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19909 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19909/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [TokenFlow: Consistent Diffusion Features for Consistent Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10373/) (2023)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [PhysGaussian: Physics-Integrated 3D Gaussians for Generative Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12198/) (2023)
- [DragNUWA: Fine-grained Control in Video Generation by Integrating Text, Image, and Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08089/) (2023)
- [Shape of Motion: 4D Reconstruction from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13764/) (2024)
- [Animating Arbitrary Objects via Deep Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08861/) (2018)
- [DepthCrafter: Generating Consistent Long Depth Sequences for Open-world Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02095/) (2024)
- [VideoScore: Building Automatic Metrics to Simulate Fine-grained Human Feedback for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15252/) (2024)
- [SpatialTracker: Tracking Any 2D Pixels in 3D Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04319/) (2024)
- [MoSca: Dynamic Gaussian Fusion from Casual Videos via 4D Motion Scaffolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17421/) (2024)
- [Splatt3R: Zero-shot Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13912/) (2024)
- [Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02700/) (2024)
- [MotionDirector: Motion Customization of Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08465/) (2023)
- [Tora: Trajectory-oriented Diffusion Transformer for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21705/) (2024)
- [Consistent4D: Consistent 360deg Dynamic Object Generation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02848/) (2023)
- [Space-Time Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot Text-Driven Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17009/) (2023)
- [Bilateral Reference for High-Resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03407/) (2024)
- [4Diffusion: Multi-view Video Diffusion Model for 4D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20674/) (2024)
- [STAG4D: Spatial-Temporal Anchored Generative 4D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14939/) (2024)
- [Motion-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Controllable Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14404/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Gaussian Marbles for Novel View Synthesis of Casual Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18717/) (2024)
- [Unpaired Motion Style Transfer from Video to Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05751/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Motion Marionette, a zero-shot framework for rigid motion transfer from monocular source videos to single-view target images. Previous works typically employ geometric, generative, or simulation priors to guide the transfer process, but these external priors introduce auxiliary constraints that lead to trade-offs between generalizability and temporal consistency. To address these limitations, we propose guiding the motion transfer process through an internal prior that exclusively captures the spatial-temporal transformations and is shared between the source video and any transferred target video. Specifically, we first lift both the source video and the target image into a unified 3D representation space. Motion trajectories are then extracted from the source video to construct a spatial-temporal (SpaT) prior that is independent of object geometry and semantics, encoding relative spatial variations over time. This prior is further integrated with the target object to synthesize a controllable velocity field, which is subsequently refined using Position-Based Dynamics to mitigate artifacts and enhance visual coherence. The resulting velocity field can be flexibly employed for efficient video production. Empirical results demonstrate that Motion Marionette generalizes across diverse objects, produces temporally consistent videos that align well with the source motion, and supports controllable video generation.