# DisMo: Disentangled Motion Representations for Open-World Motion Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23428 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23428/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [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)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [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)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03011/) (2023)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [MVHOI: Bridge Multi-view Condition to Complex Human-Object Interaction Video Reenactment via 3D Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14686/) (2026)
- [PhiZero: A World Model Built Around Physical Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28624/) (2026)
- [TrAction: Action Recognition with Sparse Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03490/) (2026)
- [How to Build Digital Humans? From Priors to Photorealistic Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04341/) (2026)
- [AnyAct: Towards Human Reenactment of Character Motion From Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15497/) (2026)
- [DeltaCam: Differential Intrinsic Camera Modeling for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25266/) (2026)
- [Schr"odinger's Cat: Probabilistic Representation and Prediction of Potential Scene Kinematics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25984/) (2026)
- [Motion Beyond Morphology: Bootstrapping Cross-Category Motion Transfer from Abstract Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01628/) (2026)
- [What Moves? Localized Motion Representations for Compositional Scene Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04383/) (2026)
- [TT-VidT: Decoupling the Temporal Axis for Efficient Motion-Centric Video Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33419/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models, have enabled the creation of visually compelling and dynamic videos from simple textual descriptions or initial frames. However, these models often fail to provide an explicit representation of motion separate from content, limiting their applicability for content creators. To address this gap, we propose DisMo, a novel paradigm for learning abstract motion representations directly from raw video data via an image-space reconstruction objective. Our representation is generic and independent of static information such as appearance, object identity, or pose. This enables open-world motion transfer, allowing motion to be transferred across semantically unrelated entities without requiring object correspondences, even between vastly different categories. Unlike prior methods, which trade off motion fidelity and prompt adherence, are overfitting to source structure or drifting from the described action, our approach disentangles motion semantics from appearance, enabling accurate transfer and faithful conditioning. Furthermore, our motion representation can be combined with any existing video generator via lightweight adapters, allowing us to effortlessly benefit from future advancements in video models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a diverse set of motion transfer tasks. Finally, we show that the learned representations are well-suited for downstream motion understanding tasks, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art video representation models such as V-JEPA in zero-shot action classification on benchmarks including Something-Something v2 and Jester. Project page: https://compvis.github.io/DisMo